


The House of Kaldwin

by noun



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Cultists, Drugged Sex, F/M, Fugue Feast (Dishonored), Low Chaos Emily Kaldwin, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-21
Updated: 2018-12-26
Packaged: 2019-04-05 09:21:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 26,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14041122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noun/pseuds/noun
Summary: Delilah has fallen, and Dunwall is in the slow process of rebuilding, lead by an Empress who has recommitted to ruling, having finally put to rest the ghost of her mother. But the Mark she accepted to bring Deliah down hasn’t faded, and she and the Outsider continue the dance that began when Corvo won back her birthright.Until, like so many Marked before her, she suddenly loses his attention. In the face of the politics surrounding the Isles, this may not be such a bad thing, particularly given the throne’s renewed relationship with the Abbey. The preternatural mixes poorly with the waking world, but Emily may not have a choice, as not all threats to the throne are mundane or threats to Emily alone.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted July 2017, taken down for editing and to better conform to DoTO canon and revelations. 
> 
> As a fair warning, later chapters of this work will include coercive sex. The coercion is done by a third party. 
> 
> This work updates Tuesdays, barring travel or other disruptions. 
> 
> You can find me on tumblr, at flatpatterning! Cover art by ayveehearts @ tumblr.

 

* * *

“Is there anything else?” Emily asks, watching High Overseer Khulan.

For the entity of their meeting, he has stood with his hands clasped at the small off his back. He is as comfortable in parade rest as most men are hunched in chairs. Khulan is well-trained; bears the marks of a military background. Far too many fuss, shift their weight, glance at seats. It's a breach of etiquette to sit before given permission from the Empress, but one enforced loosely before her return. She has proven stricter with these things lately, and remaining standing is such a small show of loyalty. Khulan has taken to it, remaining statuesque with the zeal of a man devoted. The small witches and heretics he'd uprooted over the course of his career were nothing compared to Delilah in the flesh. He had failed to protect Dunwall and the Empire from Delilah, and it had scored his soul. But where he and the Abbey had failed, Emily had succeeded, and saved them all.

Because of that, he is hers, with every fiber of his being.

“Yes,” Khulan admits. He falters, and looks to the side before he answers. He wore a mask too often in his youth, and guards his expression too little. Corvo, she suspects, despairs of it. She offers no prompting to Khulan, allowing him to stew in his thoughts like meat cooking in hot oil before he speaks.

“We—” the Abbey, he means, “—have consulted the portents, and spoken with the Sisters. It seems the Fugue Feast will last two days this year. Approximately.”

n the throne room, it's only Emily, Corvo, and Khulan, so she's granted quiet while she considers the abnormality. He's breaking Abbey law by giving her this gift, this warning he thinks she needs.

Khulan opens his mouth, the first breath of a syllable escaping his mouth like the whistle from a kettle, but Emily leans forward and shakes her head.

“Thank you,” she says to Khulan. “Your concern is commendable, but unnecessary.”

So many men began to serve when she was but a young girl. If they were older, they had known the scandal of her birth, of her mother’s demure postponement in taking a consort or naming Emily’s father. If younger, their first impression of her was of her kidnapping. Possessing Emily Kaldwin meant that the throne was yours in all but name. Burrows had made her a pawn, a prize, and the specter of that had followed her around all her life. She is still surrounded by men who saw themselves as father-figure to the child empress, by men who wanted to shield her or thought she was weak. Khulan’s concern stems from this, she knows, no matter how he thinks it a kindness.

"If that's all, we're done for the day."

Emily stands, and inclines her head in a small nod in the direction of the High Overseer. He bows to her, as is proper, and she hears Corvo’s boots as he steps to, as always, stay a step to her left and two feet behind her. Corvo doesn't have to wait long to speak, though he restrains himself until once they're inside her apartments. The private portions of Dunwall Tower aren't too far from the public, but he restrains himself absolutely until the heavy reinforced doors close and guarantee them privacy.

“You don’t have to do this,” he says. Emily sits at her vanity, and looks at Corvo through the corner of her mirror, at the displeased twist of his mouth hovering over her left shoulder.

“Do you remember...” she starts, hands stilling on the clasp of her necklace. “Do you remember the Feasts before I turned seventeen?”

He nods once, serious.

"The safe room didn't remind me of the Cat. That wasn't why I hated being stuck in there. I did like the card games," Emily admits. She pulls out the pin holding her hair in place, and rolled it between her fingers, setting it in a scrimshaw bowl made for holding the little pieces of a ladies’ toilette. “You were afraid. I know that now. And every so often you would glance about. You always clenched your left hand. You were using your Mark, father?"

“Yes,” he murmurs. He has always been succinct. Corvo reaches over her shoulder for her hairbrush. He drags it through her hair, working through snares and knots.

His hands are bare. For fifteen years, she never saw them ungloved. Every so often, he wore fingerless gloves, but the back of his hands remained covered. Now, it's Emily who keeps her hands covered but for when she's in the private of her rooms. She peels the suede off, loosening finger by finger until they give and she can pull them the rest of the way. On the back of her hand, the Mark is still inked across her skin. She clenches her hand into a fist, rested on her thigh.

There is no ‘have to’. And if he misunderstands from there onward, no explanation will untangle it for him.

They stand there, and she doesn’t say anything else until he finishes brushing her hair. He sets the brush down on the vanity, and goes to the window to stare down at the harbor. Emily swings her legs around the bench and stands, rolling her shoulders. Eager to be done for the day, she strips off her formal clothes—shirt, jacket, pants—and pauses only to remove the knife hidden in her jacket. She hands it to Corvo before folding the clothes and putting them on a side bench, toeing off her shoes.

“Is he bothering you?” Corvo asks, looking over the knife, which she hasn’t needed to use since the last time he checked it for faults. They both know who he’s speaking of.

“No,” she says firmly, crossing over to the bathroom and throwing open the doors. A question is born and dies on her tongue in an instant. Did be ‘bother’ Corvo, back during the days of the regency? Has he stopped, now that Deliah’s ripped the Mark off his hand?

Does he miss it?

“I want to be alone for a while. I want four guards outside my doors and a double rotation on the porch.” He asks no follow-up, just nods and goes to the main door to her apartments, placing her knife on her vanity. He’ll leave once she’s closed the door to the bathroom.

He knows what she intends to do. She had found his bone charms when she had fled in the night—both useless to her, intended to increase a man’s luck with a pistol and his speed after he killed. But she hadn’t broken them for the whalebone, too intent on keeping some small part of her father with her. He doesn’t try to dissuade her, only looks at her, almost—afraid. He had reminded her she doesn’t need to do this, as if it was being held over her head.

“Emily,” he says, “be careful.”

It’s been ten short months since she trapped Delilah in her painting.

Ten months since she took back what was hers and freed her father, and more than a year since she was Marked.

Delilah nearly ruined Dunwall in a little more than two months. Emily knows she’ll be healing the wounds for decades. How is the world in Delilah’s painting doing? Does it conjure all, down to the poorest citizens? Does her aunt offer them more thought than she had when she ruled the true Dunwall?

(“And where do the silver cups in the Tower come from, Empress?”)

Emily turns the tap and allows herself a smile when hot water gushes out. At least that works. The pipes had been cleared of moss and filth, but the infrastructure itself hadn’t been damaged. The carriage lines needed to be rebuilt in some parts of the city, but she has aspirations. The ruins allow her to build freely.

Khulan lives. Some of the members of Parliament managed to hide themselves in bolt holes during the coupe, and returned once she took back the throne. The nobility is shaken, but most of them hid in their estates for the duration. But the common folk of Gristol— how can they feel confident and safe when their capitol has been nearly brought to ruin twice within twenty years?

Emily pours bath salts into the steaming tub, and checks the water with her fingertips before discarding the last of her clothes and slipping in. She always thinks more fluidly when she’s in the water. She slides until her nose is hovering over the water and she can see the steam as it rises off the surface.

When she dunks her head under the water to rinse it clean, she holds for a moment. Emily opens her eyes, and through the murky water, stares at the ceiling. Her eyes start to burn from the soap—not salt—but she holds it until her lungs ache before she emerges, bringing her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them, while her wet hair runs streams down her back.

She is allowed these few minutes of peace, of thinking of nothing and being nowhere but here. She hungers for it less—these moments in the bath enough of a balm to her. Emily doesn’t dash across the rooftops in nighttime excursions as often as she used to. 

The water starts to cool after a few minutes, and briskly, she finishes, pulling the plug from the tub and then stepping out, wrapping herself in a soft, warm towel. She brushes her teeth, combs out her hair, and rubs creams into her face and hands.

As it always does on these nights, her Mark is—humming. Not running over with power, begging to be used, but an ache like one might have from clenching a muscle. It sings of anticipation, of promise, all pent-up and waiting. He is not summoning her. If she ignores it, and goes to bed, it’ll fade.

She is slow, then, when she starts to work the last of the lavender-scented cream—she cannot abide roses, anymore—unto the back of her hand. She traces the burn of the longest swoop with a fingertip, a moment of sentimentality, before she continues to turn her hands until she’s satisfied.

Her feet are dry when she makes her way down the hallway, the towel draped about her shoulders in a poor imitation of a cape, but it stops the water dripping from her hair reaching the floor—she won’t risk a mess. She pauses only to grab a nightgown from her wardrobe and shrug it on, tugging it down and letting it fall to reach her knees. Her signet ring fits into the slot of the door with a click, as it always has, and the door slides open as it has opened every time before.

It is the last nook that has been converted. As altars go, it is sedate—no winding coils of barbed wire, no great sharp pieces of driftwood twined together—it is what was once a marble-topped end table, with a bolt of purple cloth spilling from where it has been nailed to the ceiling over the surface. Emily lights the scattering of well-used candles with a match and a practiced hand, getting them all ablaze within a moment.

The Timepiece sits on the altar, next to her collection of bonecharms—not the ones she found, the ones she made, herself. She will not keep runes here, far too aware of the pull, and she only keeps the bonecharms here in part because she has nowhere else to put them that is both secure and still in reach.

The altar is a poor thing, compared to other shrines. She isn’t much for worship, in truth, and it is hardly an altar, anyway. No worship happens here. But this does what it is meant to; makes it is easier for him to find her.

Tugging the towel a bit more securely about her shoulders, she settles before the altar, sitting back on her heels. She breathes out, breathes in, closes her eyes, breathes out, and—

The first breath of the Void does and will always disorient her. It is not a place meant for men and women to go wandering. The Overseers preach that the dead are trapped here, an infinity of ghosts wailing and screaming, driven mad by the endless nothing.

Emily finds it—peaceful. If one does not look too long or too hard at any particular thing, if one does not listen to the noise at the edge of your hearing, then all will be well. It is honest in the way it lures you towards madness, and she can appreciate that.

Slowly, she raises herself off her knees. Tonight, a rather vintage outfit has been chosen for her—straight-legged trousers, cut at the knee in a dark black, deep blue woolen socks, fine shoes, a jacket that matches the trousers, and a silk blouse more suited for Karnaca than Dunwall’s chill. She thinks, as she checks the jacket’s cuffs, that she saw a similar outfit on her grandmother’s portrait that hangs in the hall—but this place is beyond time.

The voice, tonight, comes from behind her.

“Hello, Emily,” the Outsider says.

She understands why she consented, pursued, initiates. His motivations are less subject to her critique. Perhaps they are simply unflattering, for either of them—curiosity sated on both sides, if she’s optimistic—but she does not delve too deeply.

There’s plenty to distract her in the Void itself.

Emily turns to face him. He sets himself down slowly, legs straightening and then boots touching the floor, giving up the pretext of hovering. He still flickers, though, dissolves into shards and reappears. Perhaps he cannot help it. Perhaps simply walking too much is mundane.

She appreciates the gestures of humanity, no matter how small. But—he is shorter than her. If they were to embrace, the top of his head would be at her eye level.

The Void has chosen to mimic her apartments. A floor, three walls, the wooden floor splintering off towards what would have been the far wall. She reaches for the balcony, alighting on the rail with an easy breath. In a shudder of obsidian shards, the Outsider appears next to her, and she hops down, once more using her sigil ring to open the door. The construct groans, and the door slides to reveal some of her apartment.

“Only exploring,” she says. Beyond the windows, she can see a whale floating somewhere in the distance. She crosses over to her sitting table, gazing down a hallway that would have turned into her bathroom were the Void not to have truncated it halfway down, the floor abruptly ending and a scattering of detritus bordering the edges.

She sits, legs crossed, and it doesn’t take him long to join her, although it looks stranger, as if he’s not sure how to do it. He knows how his body ought to look when it is finished, but the finer steps—the getting it to that point—look awkward.

(He said he was fifteen when the cultists came for him. He does not look it, not anymore, but he moves sometimes with the confusion teenaged boys do, the adjustment to a stretched-out body, coltish.)

“Khulan is concerned about your safety during the Feast. He thought to offer you sanctuary in the Abbey’s own halls, where no witchcraft could penetrate,” the Outsider says, sitting in her high-backed chairs rigidly, those long fingered hands curled loosely in his lap. “He worries still that the Abbey could have prevented Delilah’s rise, and broods over your continued favor despite that.”

“Further soothing won’t do any good, then,” Emily replies, picking at a lace cuff, smoothing it flat after. “Perhaps I’ll ask him to visit with Byrne, to discuss counter-measures and precautions against witchcraft. If I’m sufficiently cold, he will view it as a punishment, and stop this self-flagellation.” She winces. “Before it turns into literal flagellation.”

She would not put it past Khulan.

Emily looks off to the side, to some middle distance rather than gazing through the Void itself, exhaling slowly. She is reassembling her empire, and it is taking time. In Karnaca, she had only herself and Meagan and the work of their hands. Perhaps it is easier to be a conqueror. Delilah, in her painting, sails and explores and does none of the hard work of ruling.

He reaches out, and touches her cheek. His skin is so cold. She turns her head to face him, and his hand remains on her face.

“Fear not, Emily Kaldwin. Your future does not look so grim,” he murmurs. His eyes, black-on-black, watch her, and though they have been doing this for months, there is still something unnerving about them.

“It will, if I don’t pay attention,” she states, and curls her fingers loosely about his wrist, pulling his hand off her. She turns it to kiss the back of his palm, as if to apologize—he keeps the pronouncements and omens few, and she doesn’t call attention to his nature, doesn’t call him anything other than ‘you’ and certainly hasn’t offered explanations to anyone, even Corvo, who is mostly just assuming despite his frequency accuracy. Which means there isn’t much else for them to do than to talk like this and touch, through whatever scene the Void spits up around her.

“You take me to such interesting places,” she notes, looking around the mimicry of her rooms. Usually, it is some scene she knows well. Several times they’ve found themselves back on the Wale. Once it was the Hounds Pit.

The Outsider smiles his crooked smile. “Is this not satisfying? Is there somewhere you would rather be?”

She shakes her head, leaning back in her chair.

“This is fine.” They’re beyond playing favorites. Father has mentioned Vera Morray to her, and while she’s confident in her own sanity, she has the feeling he’s never done this for his other Marked.

‘What do you get out of this?’ she wonders, as she takes his hand between both of hers, and brings it to her mouth, where her lips just rest against his knuckles between rings, her thumbs rubbing back and forth against his skin. He will not warm to her touch, no matter what she does. His body will always feel just a bit too odd, just slightly wrong in a way that has the hair on the back of her neck on alert.

The vulnerability of telling her about the altar made him realer. It was when Emily began to look at him differently. To think of him not as a force but as a person, under all that.

(There is a scar, on his throat, a fingerspan above the dip of his collarbone.)

He lowers their hands—she allows it, and he leans forward, his eyes closing just before he kisses her, so chastely, so hesitantly. Even Wyman had not shown restraint so well. She squeezes his hand, clasped between hers, and is not surprised when her Mark warms and something like euphoria pools in her stomach. He has never been anything but gentle, or kind, if only in these moments.

But he abhors violence. She ought not to have expected otherwise, even the first time.

He is cold, his lips against hers and faintly parted with no presumption to deepen the kiss and his lips tasting faintly of seawater. He never presumes; always requires invitation. When he cups her cheek, his touch is reluctant, feather-light in how his fingers brush against her skin and do not grip, only hold. She is the one to deepen the kiss, to break it, to stand and slide into his lap. He is a slim thing, wiry, and he could have chosen any body for himself, but this was the one he crafted, vulnerable, where her hands span his wrists so easily.

Straddling his legs, she opens his coat, fingers working their way down the rows of buttons.

“You can’t just—disappear this, can you?” she hisses. His hands are at her waist, and they slide down to her thighs. He gets in the way when he leans in to kiss her neck. His smile is a small thing, the corners of his mouth lifting and softening some of the horror of his eyes. He does not bare his teeth.

“I could,” he admits. “But I enjoy the sight of you vexed.”

She rests a hand on the back of the chair rather than continuing to bother with the jacket, and mumbles something as he mouths along the line of her throat. A weak noise escapes her, and her calves squeeze his thighs.

He does not disappear her clothes, but he does make quick work of them, and then of her, the both of them breathing harsh and high in a Void empty but for them and the noises they make while fucking.

She feels when he comes doubly, in her own body and through the Mark, something sparking like flint off steel, and it’s enough to finish her a second time, panting with her face pressed against the upholstery of the chair.

He sits there, his thin ribs rising and falling, fitting into the curve of her body as she raises her head sluggishly and looks down at him. The Void strips away sweat, the tacky unfortunate aftermaths of coitus ignored or stripped away by a realm that mirrors reality imperfectly.

“Is it dawn yet,” she murmurs, trailing her fingers over his shoulders.

The Outsider doesn’t bother looking at her. A low cry echoes across the Void—whalesong, nearly mournful. Emily thinks she can tell the difference by now.

“Would you like it to be?” he asks, and she shakes her head, withdrawing her hand and sitting up and hugging her knees. The clothes she was in are scattered about the rock, but they are not real, and she doesn’t need to dress herself.

“No,” Emily decides, squinting across the distance. “I ought to sleep in my own bed.”

To keep up the pretense, in a way, and also because as much as Corvo knows, he doesn’t need to be reminded constantly. She’s able to say something to the Outsider about the Feast, a question about something he said and turns to do so, but his expression shifts and he looks cross—though it’s ruined somewhat by his nudity, his shoulders robbed of the extra span and imposing sharpness his fine coat gives him—and like ash in the wind, he disappears. A caress ghosts over her cheek—a poor apology—and she’s fully expecting the vertigo as reality tilts, closing her eyes tight so she needn’t see everything shatter. She finds herself back before the shrine—hair damp, thighs dry, and a look at the clock telling her it’s only been half an hour since she closed her eyes.

Emily says nothing to the empty room and stands slowly, and tugs the towel more firmly around her shoulders. She will wear the woolen pajamas tonight, she thinks, to help draw the cold from her bones.


	2. Chapter 2

The palace is an animal. It swallows hundreds of pounds of raw materials, and belches out state dinners and laws and majesty. She has seen the bills for soap alone, for her linens, for the food in the kitchens, and she assuages her guilt for the expenses with the stability her consistent and steady reign produces throughout the Isles.

It helps, she thinks, that she has Jameson go over the accounts with her midweek, and that discrepancies can be sorted out as quickly as they’re spotted. They sit in her office and work through the ledgers together, a cup of tea at Emily’s elbow and pear soda at Jameson’s, and their low chatter spills into gossip more often than not. Jameson’s, of course, is far better than her own, but she supposes Corvo would have the best, if her father were half as witty as the youngest Curnow and also gathered most of his information by listening to what nobles tittered about to one another and extracted fact from it.

“—to which she said, tomorrow she’d be sober, but Lord Wains would still be ugly.”

Jameson grins, looking up from the account with his fingers darkened by the ink, and Emily laughs, not to reward him as she would a courtier, but genuine and bright. About to continue with another tale, he leans forward, his chair creaking, but a knock on the door halts him.

“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” the guard outside says, and cracks the door open, “—but a Mr. Fillmore is here to see you.”

The silence lasts long enough for Jameson to glance at Emily, something like horror on his face, and then the door is flung open, the guards out of sorts and scrambling for protocol, unsure, because Azariah Fillmore is unique among men.

“My Empress,” he booms, and Emily is already slipping around the side of the desk to come greet the lord of Brigmore Manor. He grins at her as he bows, taking off his hat and gesturing grandly. “Good to see you—I keep telling Lord Attano that the portraiture of you on the coinage does you no justice, none. He ought to let me put out an ale for the next anniversary of your coronation with some proper work that’ll capture you— ”

Arms full of papers as he hurriedly tidies up, Jameson interrupts, “Mr. Fillmore.”

She doesn’t know the whole of the story, but what she does know is that Jameson was put on rotation with Azariah Fillmore for a weekend shortly after the Masquerade, returned very hungover, and that he’s never been able to muster up his usual cockiness around the man. And in sight of Jameson’s clear wavering bravery, and Corvo’s standing orders that Fillmore was always a welcome guest, even with his boisterousness, the guards will be taking their guidance from Emily.

Or, better yet, Corvo, as he steps into the doorway beside Azariah, hands behind his back and shoulders calmly squared.

“Lord Protector,” Emily greets him, admittedly delighted with the picture before her. She sets down her pen, and folds her hands over the papers, already sitting up straighter in her chair. “Please, gentlemen, enter, and close the door behind you.”

Once Corvo and Azariah enter, the guard complies with Emily’s request for them, glad to wall off whatever discussion might be taking place.

“I thought,” Corvo rasps, pulling out a chair for himself and sitting opposite Emily, “that Azariah should take lunch with us.”

Emily finishes putting the papers into order, and glances from Corvo to Azariah to Jameson, who has moved to the windows, leaning casually against a sill.

“This isn’t a gathering for a friendly lunch, is it?” she asks, and Jameson nods. “The guards?”

“Mine. From before,” Corvo confirms, and she can’t help but be pleased that he’s reassembled a guard he’s sure of, though she’s positive that his definition of confidence in loyalty has changed since Ramsey.

“Then…” she trails off, waiting for him to fill in the rest, but not starting it herself. Corvo looks to Azariah, who speaks for him.

“Zhukov, Empress. His knife, those corrupted bonecharms."

“Broken Tom,” Corvo murmurs, and Azariah nods. 

“Aye, and that fool. The ilk that built him will try again, mark my words.”

Jameson shakes his head sadly. “Martha Cottings was a fine officer.”

Corvo says, “The artifacts they have grant them powers beyond what any normal agent of mine or any member of the Watch could combat.”

“I will not spread more Overseers across the city,” Emily says. “The Abbey and the Crown must remain separate. And,” she drums her fingers on the arm of her chair. “—the music boxes may not work on all these objects. They did nothing against Zhukov or his knife.”

And everything against her father—and now, her. Azariah and Jameson are being very polite by not looking at her hand, gloved today in black leather, matching the rest of the traditional black Imperial suit.

“There was one more,” she admits. “I fought a gang leader while I was in Karnaca. He had—a hand. It attacked me, moved like it was alive—” was Marked, but she’ll tell Corvo that later. “—he couldn’t be killed while he had it. He only turned into a swarm of rats when attacked.”

Corvo stares at her, then shakes his head.

“Granny Rags,” he says, and Azariah half jumps in his seat.

“You killed that old witch after she tried to eat me!” he exclaims, and Corvo nods.

“She didn’t die easily.”

“Not all of her,” Jameson agrees, and they sit in silence for a moment.

“I didn’t destroy the hand. It… escaped,” she concludes. “But the knife—Zhukov’s knife—we need to find that, and destroy it.”

The events of the Boyle Masquerade don’t need to be repeated. And the knife itself—it dragged across his throat, all those millennia ago. He had been thoughtful enough to show her the slab he’d lain on in the Void; it’s not difficult for her to fill the rest in for the imagining of the actual event.

“I will speak with Khulan,” Emily says, and pushes her chair back from her desk, crossing to the front to lean down at kiss Azariah on the cheek, who chuckles warmly. “Thank you for coming to visit, Lord Fillmore. Please, eat with us before you go.”

“It’s Mr. Fillmore, dear girl,” he says.

“Lord,” she repeats. “I’ve had a shortage of nobles in the past few months, and none held their estates as well as you during Delilah, or disappeared as many of the supply ships coming into the harbor. I need a new minister of trade.”

He grins, and starts to laugh, and Emily leaves him behind after squeezing his hand to open the doors and request lunch.

 

* * *

The Office of the High Overseer took less damage than she had expected. In fact, when she had first returned from Karnaca, and begun the rebuilding process, she had called for lists to be drawn up of the public works of Dunwall that were the worst off. Holger Square hadn’t even been on it, though the cost of the building being in mostly good repair—the worst of it being glass replacement for windows and a new statue of Benjamin Holger—was paid for in Overseer blood.

They would not have lasted another month, Khulan had admitted to her, once he’d been freed from the care of the doctors. She could believe it.

So the square she walks into—the cobblestones she walks down, two Officers at her back, though it makes her shoulderblades itch—is much the same one she walked down as a child, her little hand in Jessamine’s, and then on her own. The Overseer at the gate nods to her, respectful, and she turns to face the women Corvo had assigned to her for the day.

“Wait here," she orders. "I do not doubt the Abbey’s ability to keep me safe within their walls.” Both salute smartly—she doesn’t know their names, lost to the carriage ride over as she contemplated her words—and the Overseer at the gate stands a little taller. She’s sure she’ll come back to find the three of them playing cards, chattering. Corvo may well have tasked them with seeing what they could pull from the Overseers they meet.

Emily passes under Holger’s watchful eye and enters through the lobby without any shame. The vastness of the empty marble space conveys what the Abbey wishes it to—she feels small, staring at the Stricture pillars, at the symbol carved into the floor and contrasted so well in offset marble. She hears footsteps, and turns to see Khulan appearing at the head of the stairs.

“High Overseer,” she says, and comes to him—meets him in the middle, in truth, because he comes to her, and offers her his arm, which she takes—her fingertips on the thick leather of his glove.

“Empress,” he intones. He is gaining his zealous jolliness back, day by day, and she prefers it. Together, they ascend the stairs, down hallways, passing the occasional other person as they go. Khulan didn’t take the largest office in the building for himself, making a smaller one his own. That one, formerly Campbell’s, has been converted into storage.

She has been here before, so when he holds the door open for her, she takes the small chair across from the wooden desk easily. Carven into the desk are the Strictures—RESTLESS HANDS faces her now, but hers are settled calmly in her lap, and any unease she may have had stepping in this building, Marked as she is, well—how could her heresy hold a candle to Delilah’s?

(That the Abbey is so poor at discovering her ought to be of some concern.)

Kuhlan settles into his simple chair, and seems to deflate somewhat, shoulders easing. He is such an expressive man, smiling freely, frowning. Living behind a mask must encourage that, Emily supposes, as it prevents cultivating ones’ face into blankness, or controlled reactions.

“Might I ask why you’ve chosen to honor me with your presence, Lady Emily?” There’s a pitcher of water with slices of lime floating in it on the desk; Khulan reaches over and takes it, pouring her a glass before taking one for himself. She likes Khulan—he follows the Strictures earnestly, and has been by her side for years now. He would light the pyre if she was found to be Marked, doubtless, but he won’t find out.

“I have questions,” she asks, curling her fingers around the cool glass, and leaning back in her chair. “Of a scriptural nature. I thought I could impose on your time, and trust in your discretion. I encountered things of a… heretical nature while fighting Delilah, and I need to put them to rest.”

Khulan nods slowly, standing back up to close his door, even in the sanctity of the Office. She waits until he returns to his chair, and then speaks slowly, as if she’s mulling over the words, choosing them carefully.

She decided what she wanted to know hours ago, after she had finished her little lunch with Azariah.

“During the Feast, we both know certain… heretical trespasses occur.” Emily folds her legs, following the trail of the strictures around the desk. ROVING FEET follows, and RAMPANT HUNGER makes the turn around the corner of the desk. “With two days of mischief, I was hoping the Abbey would be able to offer me some form of … assurance that the heretics doubtless still in the city would not be able to stir up too much trouble.”

Khulan takes a drink of his water before he responds, shaking his head. “I cannot share Abbey secrets with even you, Empress, but rest assured that no mischief will take place.”

He says it with such confidence that she's thrown. And intrigued, lips pursing as she leans toward.

“Please, Yul. I need more than words.” She waits, her plea hanging between them– fifteen years of his service hanging between them– and Khulan droops, giving in.

He stands, and walks over to his small window overlooking the city. Unsure if he is making sure no one is watching, or seeking more time, Emily remains sitting. She is very good at remaining absolutely still.

“After Whitecliff, as the Abbey was built, we began to pull the faithful towards unity. Most gladly accepted the Order gifted to them. Others were uneasy. In an attempt to comfort, and bring more to the flock, certain holidays were added to the Calendar. These days had once held significance to the cults, but turned to a new purpose…” He spreads his hands, looking at Emily.

“They redirected those who might wander. I see,” she says. “Go on.”

Khulan is slow to reveal the Abbey’s secrets, chewing the words. “The Fugue Feast replaced an earlier debaucherous festival. The records that remain indicate it was a time of death. That the previous year had died, and so the new was born. Naturally, there was a great deal of murderous sacrifice around it.” He sighs. “Beasts, but children as well, in the least enlightened places. The year had died, but to birth the new one, the Void, the Outsider—” the zeal he spits out the name with is vicious. “— needed to be appeased.”

Khulan pulls off his gloves, one another the other, and uses the heel of his hand to rub his eyes. “The Sisters cannot prophesy during those days. The Void is blessedly quiet, if only until the signs present themselves and we of the Abbey announce the end of the Feast.”

He comes back to the desk, and sits in his chair with less grace than a man his age ought to have.

“Were that it lasted.”

She reaches out and grasps his hand, her gloved ones folding over his bare skin, and she gives him a gentle squeeze.

“Thank you, Yul. You’ve set my mind at rest. I feel so much safer knowing that I needn’t fear any witchcraft.”

Khulan nods, tired, and Emily lifts his hand, gently pressing a kiss to the ring he wears as symbol of his office. He looks surprised, shocked back into the mood he’s had since she retook Dunwall.

“The Abbey of the Everyman has been steadfast, even when it looked like Delilah might win. I will not betray your trust,” she vows, and means it as much as she can, when the hand so tenderly clasping the High Overseer’s is Marked.

Khulan exhales, and shakes his head.

“Your grace and virtue are all the grander after the Witch, your imperial majesty.”

She only smiles as she stands and takes her leave, letting Khulan stew in his thoughts as she walks through the building. Emily pays her respects briefly to the urns before she exits, and as she suspected, her guards are making more polite conversation with the Overseer at the gate, jovial and laughing—she thinks she catches the glimmer of rolling dice before the taller one notices her and snaps to attention, murmuring empress while the other one falls into step. The Overseer looks embarrassed, standing at attention so sharply that he’s nearly on tiptoe, but she smiles at him, just a little twist of her lips, and she would bet any sum of gold that he’s red under that mask.

The joy of a day well spent buoys her to the carriage, where she sits across from one of her guards, while the other sits atop the contraption. Inside, they’re closed off from the rest of the world, and Emily is spared time to ask the question that’s been itching at the back of her mind since the morning.

“What is your name?” she asks, looking at the woman across from her, all done up in captain’s red. She loathes anonymity, and ought to have done this on the way over.

“Becca Farrow, your majesty,” the shorter one—Becca—says.

“And your partner?” Emily asks.

“Anya Lippincott.”

Emily mulls it over, as the aforementioned Anya raps on the roof to let them know they’ll be on the move soon.

“Anya?”

“Her mother was from Tyvia.”

“Oh,” Emily says, leaning back into the plush bench.

Glad to be helpful, Farrow nods. “Your majesty recalls the rest of the schedule for tonight? You’re having dinner at the Ox and Cart tonight.”

“With Wyman,” Emily murmurs in agreement, and there’s a slight lurch as the car begins to move along the track towards their next destination.

The Plague made many orphans, but it left behind parents grieving over the loss of their children as well. Some of the earliest decrees she had signed had been writs of adoption, old families passing on their names to the waifs they'd taken in— she'd elevated a great deal of children who otherwise would have remained on the street. Jameson was one of them, in fact. Children had been blessedly precious for the first half-decade after the Plague, and then the beggars and orphans had started reappearing, canaries in the mine, portents that the recovery of the city was not best for everyone. Their numbers would swell the ranks of the gangs once they were old enough to hold a pistol or knife, but it had been so hard to persuade her ministers to reallocate funds for the construction of orphanages when the Flooded District was more profitable.

She sees no mudlarks as she drove through the city now. She suspects Delilah had taken the girls that were old enough and willing, and the boys had fled or died.

The Ox and Cart is over the Wrenhaven. The further one was from Kaldwin’s Bridge, the more they avoided the destruction. Draper’s Ward was busy again, and the most popular restaurant, usually visited after tailoring appointments by the upper class, had started to take reservations again. Wyman had booked the table, and the owners had known— as did Dunwall— that a reservation for Wyman meant that Emily Kaldwin would be along as well.

When the carriage pulls to a stop along the electric track, Emily waits for Lippincott to open the door for her before she gracefully steps down. The restaurant is on a corner of a block made up of tailors and hat shops, apartments stacked on top of the storefronts.

She is recognized as soon as she disembarks— a few nods, murmurs of ‘imperial majesty’ punctuated by quiet conversation with the person next to them before the motion of the street restarts.

Everyone just wants life to return to normal.

The guards do not open the door for her. She does it herself, and they trail behind like friendly wolfhounds. It is Emily who speaks with the host, but it is utterly unnecessary because her gaze skips from the man about to guide her to the table to Wyman herself as she slowly stands from the little table in the corner and takes that little half-step forward.

Wyman has always been the better of the two of them at reaching out.

Emily— swallowing her fear, fear she didn’t have when facing the High Overseer— walks towards her former lover, aware of being watched. No clinks of silver on porcelain, just her own footsteps as she reaches out and gently takes Wyman’s hand, the one not holding her cane, drawing her closer to kiss her cheek. She lingers for a moment longer than strictly appropriate.

“It’s good to see your face,” Emily says, letting her go, and allowing her to pull her chair out, elegant and refined as ever.

“My letters weren’t enough?” Wyman cuts back, helping Emily slide her chair back under the table before taking her seat again, setting her cane against the arm. “Perhaps I ought to write more.”

There is a delicate way she’s speaking, dancing around the topic. Wyman has always been Emily’s softer side, the sort of noble who was raised to serve as an officer, no grit to them. She’s distinguished from the rest by her empathy for those under her command, but a willingness to risk her life in combat for those men and women who served under her— and no real skill with a blade beyond the sort of skills honed in a fencing salon— got her a bullet in the thigh in Morley, and an abrupt stop to the letters one empress on the run had been receiving from her.

And that was of course before Delilah’s witches caught wind of Emily Kaldwin’s lover being alive and well, and a better sort of bait than a stone father.

Wyman isn’t weak, or a coward. She knows this. Wyman believes the best of people, and having that ground down by the horrors of war, and an infection that nearly took her leg, feverish in damp safehouses and always running, well.

She cannot blame Wyman if her hands shake when she takes tea, sometimes, or if the scent of roses drains all the color from her former lover’s face. She cannot blame Wyman for the loss of what they used to have.

Wyman is, in many ways, stronger than she is. A month earlier, there had been another meeting—her, Khulan, Corvo, Wyman. Another plan hatched in private. Who could she trust, absolutely? How to best reward Morley for rising against Delilah? Could Wyman forgive her for asking this of her? There was no more room for love between them—it had crumbled like a shack in a hurricane—but there could be unshakable trust. The absolute truth that they would never need to fear a knife or barbarous whisper from the other.

This was more than many others had. Even Jessamine and Corvo, who had loved one another with the sort of ferocity that bred fairytales had not been given safety through their love. Let a union be built on trust, and surety, instead.

And so a conspiracy of four had settled. 

“Wyman,” Emily says, and she does not falter, because she is wearing her empress face, if a few shades sanded down so that others might empathize. “Will you marry me?”

Wyman looks like herself when she raises her hand to her mouth—when she gasps, when she takes the silver band Emily pulls from her pocket and puts it on her finger. It is saddening because she knows it is an act—but it is an act done to perfection.

It’s because everyone here will be telling this story. They’ll feel special, as if they were a part of it, and will tell their neighbors, friends, each exchanging previous gossip for this newer, tenderer piece. It will sweep away quite a bit of the sour remains of Delilah, and she loves Wyman even more for that, for being bright when she has so little left of herself, for doing this kind and noble thing to make things easier for Emily, for the Empire.

There is dinner, of course. On the house. And drinks purchased by a man there with his family, who clasps Wyman on the shoulder like she’s his daughter, setting the guards to flinching. And congratulations from everyone in the Ox and Cart, a few of them twice, an endless circle of people so happy for them. Wyman puts the matching band on Emily’s hand. They will need to have them engraved and sign the paperwork before the Abbey of the Everyman, but Khulan will be overjoyed, and they might wait a few months, until Dunwall is healthier.

After the fourth time someone grabs Wyman for a drunken embrace that has her nearly falling, calls her ‘empress-consort’ a bit too boisterously, Lippincott starts to stare down anyone who comes too close, and Farrow keeps her weight on her toes, ready to spring. Wyman, having drunk every toast in her name, is starting to blink too slowly, and decides it is time to go.

They make their way back to the carriage easily, though Wyman leans on her a bit more than she ought to, but Emily’s arm is around her waist and it is companionable. This is how they will be—but no further. Yet it is good. It is a solid foundation.

“They love you, you know,” she says as they climb into the carriage, and Wyman rests her head on her shoulder, smiling sloppily.

“You too,” her fiancée replies.

“They’re afraid of me,” Emily admits. “There are rumors.”

“There are rumors in Dunwall about everyone. So they’ll love me, and call me foppish, but they’ll fear and respect you,” Wyman says, and makes it sound perfectly reasonable, as she tends to do. She’s turned her face against Emily’s collar, nose against her coat. “There have been worse rulers and consorts. We won’t hurt one another. We know each other too well.”

The guards cannot hear them, sitting outside, and they have time before they get to the Tower. Emily turns to look at Wyman, and voices her fears in a slow, hesitant voice, lingering on her words.

“Do you truly want to be my consort? And all that will come with that? The dinners, the fake smiles…” She trails off, lost. “It is not a lie, but it is… I could find someone else.”

Wyman only smiles.

“I want to be your wife. Outsider’s teeth, Em, it’s not like you were ever going to…” she gestures vaguely. Emily ignores the expression. “... stop being Empress. Even when we would have done this for— Lord Corvo warned me, I’ll have you know. Then and now. But I can help take care of you best like this, even if I can’t do anything else.”

Emily exhales slowly. “You’ve never longed for power?”

Cheekily, Wyman raises her head, the melancholy and the memories cut away so that the old light can stream through. “How could I, when the view is so much better at your right hand?”

Emily laughs, and leans to kiss Wyman’s forehead, who smiles.

The carriage pulls to a stop, and Wyman detangles herself, letting Emily stand.

“I think we have to part, my love. Wouldn’t do to be alone with you before the wedding.”

Emily gives Wyman’s hand one final squeeze and nods, letting Farrow help her out of the carriage. Maybe she’d had more brandy than she thought, because she feels lightheaded. Wyman waves goodbye before closing the door, and Emily lingers to watch the carriage start up again and race down the next section of track.

“Congratulations, Empress,” Lippincott says, and Emily turns to face the Tower, her thumb spinning the new ring on her finger.

“Thank you,” she says, and goes to find her father. He’ll be pleased to know the plan ran smoothly.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for coerced sex.

The Abbey’s bells toll, again and again, a cacophony of noise, and were she closer to the street, she would hear a great cheer go up through Dunwall, but she is not.

Emily is on her throne, and all alone in her palace.

This is not, in fact, strictly true. There is a skeleton staff, paid handsomely—bought off, really—guards, patrolling the edges of the Bridge.

Corvo, too.

If pressed to guess, she would place him on the roof, watching the harbour. There are, all around the Isles, those that forsake pleasure to guard monuments or to guide the most adventurous of the revelers away from choices that would haunt them once the bells sing again.

Emily feels alone, and that’s what matters. A brief, peaceful interlude where she can be alone with her thoughts in the empty palace. Wyman has declined to spend the Feast with her, though all they would do is play cards. Propriety is the reason for their separation, as annoying as it is, but the time between the proposal and vows being signed allows for Parliament to draw up succession law, take into account the needed fine tuning of the particulars of Isles adoption law wherein the presumptive eventual heir to throne will have a father who is not the Empress’ spouse.

She stares ahead, past the columns, down towards the other end of the hall, to the great doors that lead out, the doors Delilah came in, and she listens to the blissful silence. Given time to think and orders from her father not to do any paperwork, she thinks. Mostly of Billie, on some sort of job with the Wale in the dry docks while her captain is inland. When she returns, they will speak, because there is an offer for her, a position. But she lets the thought go, lets another surface, drops it, grows weary. Emily closes her eyes, exhales, and leans back in her throne, savoring—

—the smell of seawater and ash, tasting metal, the ghost of a hand on her neck—

Emily opens her eyes, and there is no one there. Her hands press down against the arms of her throne, and she stands. There is something wrong. She takes one step forward, and another, and the world rolls, pitching wildly. She falls to her knees, trying to ignore the floor twisting before her, and then it stops.

And—nothing. No pictures have fallen from the walls, there is no screaming, just the Empress on her knees in an empty throne room, the clock on the wall ticking away.

She stands. It is not difficult, but she holds her weight differently, expecting it to happen again. The vertigo has her by the throat, and she is as alert as she would be if she was back in Karnaca, sneaking around a nobleman’s house.

Speaking of Karnaca, Emily can almost smell the tang of mine dust, the smell of the jungle overhanging the city. It is only a strong memory—the vertigo too much like her fall through the Void in Stilton’s house not to bring the smells back to her.

She looks down the empty throne room, and sees no threat, only a calm dark room, her mother’s memorial case, the banners hanging down the walls.

She will return to her apartments. Staring out at an empty throne room is awfully melancholic, even for her. She turns to her right, to the door to the private quarters of the tower, and—nothing happens. She begins to doubt it was anything more than the dam of her memories overflowing for a moment, and bringing something forward. Emily closes the door to the throne room behind her, and locks it—

—the grey slate juts out before her like a cliff. Behind her, when she turns to look, there is a tumble of cliffs, a scattering of objects veiled in mist and by distance. It is the Void, and yet it is not. When she looks up, there is a whole pod of whales overhead, singing. She has never seen so many of them at once, nor heard this song.

Being so close to the cliff’s edge makes her uneasy. She walks down, past a table strewn with natural philosophy equipment, and the mist seems to lift, to expose what lays beyond. Set into the behemoth jutting rocks are bookshelves, filled from top to bottom. She has been in the Void many times before. She knows how it adjusts to fit a memory, a reflection of the real world. Further in, it will turn to a library, perhaps, and much more solid. And yet—something is off. Her feet walk on ground more solid than she can ever recall the Void allowing. She feels heavy.

She passes an audiograph player on an end table, but does not touch it. She wants a closer look at the bookshelf, to see what is on the spine of those books closest to her.

The Void is no longer a place she fears. With all the time she’s spent inside it, she has come to realize it is a many-faceted thing. It would be a poor idea not to respect it, not to remember it has driven men mad, but she has looked down that road enough times in her life to know well how to turn her feet from that path.

If you know a wolfhound bites, you mind your fingers.

It is one of Sokolov’s books, she realizes, in a thousand different covers. Curious to check the text to see if it matches what she remembers, Emily begins to pull it from the shelf when she realizes two things. First, that she is not supposed to be here—where is the Outsider? And second, that something has /moved/, in the hallway that promises further in to the maze of shelving.

Her arm freezes in the motion of reaching for the spines of one of the books. She is dressed in informal clothes, as she was wearing—on the staircase, intending to go to bed and sleep through the Feast—and she only has a knife on her person, tucked into a sleeve.

She has never seen anything move in the Void before. Nothing organic—only herself, the Outsider, and Delilah that once. This is not a banner flapping in a remembered breeze, this is… wrong.

“Look away,” the Outsider says, suddenly behind her. Emily spins to face him, and his fingers find her chin, turn her head away from the stacks and the gaps between them where something lurks. His voice has the same cadence as that of the pod, rising only to fall. “Do not give them the pleasure of your attention.”

She raises her hand to grasp his wrist, to ask what is wrong. She is close enough to see where the whites of his eyes would be if he still possessed them, and there is the hint of what would be an iris if the darkness did not overlay everything like so much pond scum. Emily opens her mouth to ask, and—

Laying on her bed atop the covers, as rigid as a corpse in a coffin. She goes to move her head, to peer at the clock by her bedside and catch the time, only to find that her hair has been let down and she is laying on it, yanking it when she goes to turn her head. Her limbs are heavy, her mouth dry and her tongue covered in mossy film. The smell of incense ghosts in the back of her throat, and she discovers her marked hand is like a leaden weight. Exhaustion overwrites the panic that threatens to consume her, and she can hear, tinny like an audiograph played until the paper was fraying, chanting _something_ —

She is riding him, her hips rolling as she pants out breaths, and he is beneath her, letting out lustful grunts as he drives into her, the hum of the Void in the background like the breathing of onlookers. His eyes are wide, the black of them like oceans with no hint of iris visible beneath the shadow.  Emily learns forward, her breasts pressed against his chest as he tries to rise to meet her, mouth open even before their lips meet. His mouth is dry, but hot, hot, and he kisses her like he’s drinking from her, not just relishing the contact but needing it, desperate.

Why isn’t he touching me, she thinks, concerned. There are no relishing strokes of his hands down her side, no thumb at her lip to be nipped at and taken into her mouth.

She looks away from his face when it twists into a rictus of pleasure when he comes, eyes finally shut and mouth gaping wide, and she sees that they are not on a bed, but a great altar slab that she remembers, and the Outsider’s hands are bound above his head to the rock. The realization comes as he spends inside her, rutting his hips even as she stills.

He opens his eyes, breathing like a fish dropped on the dock, slumping against the altar. Her Mark burns, and fear floods her stomach to replace unspent arousal. There was a knife, when he showed her this before, a great knife about to fall upon his throat. She does not want to look up, to look beyond where the stone ends.

“Beware, Emily Kaldwin,” he croaks with a voice that sounds raw and worn while he stares up at her, and her eyes settle on the slash across his throat and do not move—

The bells singing out from Holger Square awake her. Gooseflesh has risen over her skin, she fell asleep above her covers, and though by noon the fog will have burn off the river, she is chilly. The Feast is over, gone for another year, and it was as ordinary as the rest of them despite the length. Corvo will be coming into her apartments within the hour. While the day after the Feast is always slow to begin, the staff will return to work by midday, and the palace will return to the clockwork routine.

For now, she has an extra hour or so to lay in bed, and to burrow below the covers she had ignored until now. Emily rolls onto her side, all the better to squirm under the blankets, and feels wetness trickle down her thigh with the movement. She hikes her nightgown up and slides a hand between her thighs, expecting warm blood and going over math that will somehow explain a lack of cramping and a newfound inability to read a calendar.

Drawing her hand out, she smells chlorine instead of copper and a fluid near phosphorescently blue smeared over her fingertips.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Going to need to take a hiatus and clean up some of the drafts I've had sitting in my documents for year and years. Weekly updates will resume within a month or so.

The cup of tea is warm in her hands through the mug. Sweetened with honey instead of the white sugar served in the Tower, the slightly different taste puzzles her only until she can place the flavor.

“Thanks for bringing the books,” Billie says. She sits where Emily leans, her papers spread out over what used to be Sokolov’s workbench. The Dreadful Wale has benefitted from being in port, taken advantage of the drydocks to get barnacles and dead krusts scraped off the hull, new rivets and patched as needed. Billie—though she yet occasionally thinks of her as Meagan—has also taken advantage of the time in port to do a little repair of her own. Gold has helped. Good food and not being on the run, _purpose_ , though Sokolov has left for retirement in Tyvia.

But Billie keeps looking to the sea, and Emily is running out of reasons to keep her here. Maybe she wants to follow Sokolov. Maybe she just wants to wander. Emily hasn’t asked directly. That would put a name to the concept of leaving. Make it realer.

“You’re welcome,” Emily says. “Were they helpful?”

The requests were esoteric, if nothing else, financial records and taxes and bloodline registrations, records of adoptions, records of ports. Billie seemed to still be neck deep in them, though not so involved as to turn down a visit.

“Yeah,” Billie says, and then, glancing up. “You doing ok?”

“I’m fine,” Emily says. Her hand curls into a fist. She wonders if she should tell her, and then supposes that Billie will at least understand. She could do some of the same things, once, had confessed that the Outsider had never spoken to her personally, but she grasped the concept, gave good advice, and wasn’t her father.

“The Outsider stopped speaking to me.”

Billie’s brow rises, and she goes back to her books and figures.

“Happened to _him_ , too, It’s the starting back up that you should worry about.”

Daud, she means. The hims between them are either the Outsider or Daud.

Emily shakes her head; wonders best how to frame it. How to say everything without confessing the entirety of the affair.

“He’s been… around, since my mother died, and then he stopped. Abruptly. It isn’t like him. He’s consistent. Predictable.”  

The Outsider had appeared to her in dreams at first in the Hounds Pit, a far-off figure that she could not reach, could barely see. Then, closer as she got older, and finally spoke to her when she was Marked. To go a week without seeing him after the coup, him appearing or her seeking, _that_ was a deviation. Explaining that to Billie may be beyond Emily’s abilities.

“…consider yourself lucky,” Billie says, after a pause, and she scribbles something before shuffling her papers into order, tucking some away and saving others. The older woman stands and heads to the blackboard they had once used to plot their way across Karnaca. Now, there is a map of the whole Empire on it. Billie jams a new pin in, and goes to the last one, unwrapping a length of red twine from where it had curled around the body of the last pin. She pulls it to the newest one and rewraps it, drawing a new segment of a winding line that means nothing to Emily’s uninitiated eye. “He’s fickle. At least his disinterest wasn’t violent. You’ve still got your—”

Billie waves her own hand around to illustrate, and Emily cracks a smile.

Billie hides hers by looking away, and it doesn’t last long, besides.

“And anyway,” she says, as if she realizes that her advice might need to veer into warmer territories. “If he’s been watching you that long, he’ll come back. Cryptic and useless advice, though. He’d make an excellent diplomat.”

Emily isn’t settled by it and doesn’t try and fake it for Billie. But telling someone about that odd night, leaving out the shakiness of her memory and what they had actually done, what they used to do regularly, pulls out some of the worries growing like weeds in her mind. Enough for her to set it to the side for now.

“I actually came for something else,” she says. Billie stops squinting at the map and turns to face Emily instead, arms crossed over her chest.

“I need a Royal Protector. Corvo can’t be both that and my spymaster, and he should be focusing on training a replacement spymaster. Jameson is nearly there, but I need someone I trust in the meantime.”

“You’re kidding,” Billie says.

“No,” she justifies, shifting in her stance to address Billie better. “I mean it. You understand how the world works better than anyone else I’d trust to have that close to me.”

Billie closes her eyes, exhales. Emily can’t tell if she’s ordering her thoughts or fighting with herself.

“I can’t,” Meagan says, when she finally speaks, so softly that Emily could mistake it for regret. “I have something I need to do.”

“What?” Emily asks. “I don’t mean—you don’t need to justify it, but where are you going?”

Billie opens her eyes, shakes her head. Her arms remain crossed.

“I have something I need to do,” she repeats. “I won’t try arguing that I’d be a shit choice, because I think you probably have reasons all lined up about why I’m suited for it, I just… I have something I need to do. Something needs taking care of, and it’s my responsibility, and I might not come back and you need someone able to focus on keeping you and the Empire safe, so. I can’t.”

Emily did have her reasons. She had them prepared, had run through this conversation in her mind, trying to anticipate Billie’s responses and counter them. A foreboding ‘something she needs to handle’ wasn’t among what Emily had planned for.

“I understand,” she says. It’s a shame she can’t run a Blade Verbena and keep the winner, as her grandfather had done for her mother. She feels safe on the Wale, in the belly of the ship. Billie makes her feel safe. She had thought to see if she could do the same for the Tower.

“I might,” Billie hesitates, “have someone in mind. If you would take my vouching for him.” She chews the words out like taffy, looking right at Emily.

“I would. Is he…” she trails off. “Did you know him before?”

Billie’s acquaintances tend to fall into two categories—Meagan Foster and Billie Lurk. Emily thinks she’s being very generous in taking both of them with equal weight.

“Yeah,” Billie says, her eyes closed. “Yeah, that’s why I know he’s good.”

Emily will take him at that.

“Send him to the Tower,” she says. “I’ll meet him.”

Billie cracks an eye open. “It might be a few weeks,” she warns.

“I’ll manage,” Emily says. Billie nods and goes back to her papers.

“… so you’re getting married,” she says, after the pause stretches thin between them.

“Yes,” Emily says. “The wedding is set for the start of the Month of Harvest. Or it will be. I don’t know if the palace has announced the date yet.”

“Barely a month isn’t a lot of time,” Billie points out. “Not to plan an event the Empire hasn’t been able to celebrate since…”

She squints, trying to recall.

“Since before my grandfather,” Emily offers. Someone told her the specifics, when it was the last time a sitting ruler wed, but all she can recall was that it was a while ago. One of the Olaskirs, surely. “It has to be ornate, but how that can be with the city still in such a state? Morley is still at risk of an uprising, but Wyman sitting beside me and raising our heir strips away their justification.”

Billie shifts in her seat, looking at her with her mouth drawn thin. “Do you still love her?”

“I never stopped,” Emily admits. “But it’s different now. We’re different.”

That she is admitting this—that she has come to the woman who was there the night her mother died to ask for advice—does not go unnoticed by some cynical part of her heart. Billie will keep her secrets. Billie is both brutally practical and yet entertains sentimentality. She knows about Deidre, pulled the truth out about Delilah one night while they worked through a cigar without a single mention of _him_.

“I’d let her hold a knife to my throat,” Emily says. “I don’t have time to court, and who else could know me like she does? I want her to stay. She doesn’t want to leave. Maybe it is that simple.”

“She’s a smart girl,” Billie says. “Seems like it, anyway. Has she started training again?”

Emily shakes her head. “Her leg…”

“I’ll let my acquaintance know. There’s no reason why she shouldn’t be.”

Emily wonders who, exactly, she has in mind, if she’s confident enough that they’ll be able to go against Wyman’s silence in the wake of her injury and pull something other than stone-faced muteness out of her.

The set of the sun in the sky through a porthole reminds her what time it is, and she pushes away from the table, finishing off her tea and going to put the mug in the sink in what passes for a kitchen.

“Can you get yourself back?” Billie calls out from the other room. She’s absorbed by whatever work she’s doing, Emily knows.  

“I will.” It’s a short swim to the docks if she felt like roughing it, but the skiff she took here is bobbing in the lull of the Wrenhaven, and it’ll suit to get her back to shore. She takes one last look at Billie, sitting with her papers spread about, researching something she won’t offer an explanation for. The older woman looks up and gives Emily a little half smile.

“You’re working hard,” Billie says. “It’ll all sort itself out.”

Emily shakes her head, unable to keep her lips from turning up, and heads up to the deck.


	5. Chapter 5

The stage is set up just outside the gates of Dunwall Tower. The Tower District is crowded, most densely near the barrier that divides the street from the stage where Emily will speak. The backdrop is hung with the Kaldwin crest in blue; gold embroidery courtesy of the Dressmaker’s Guild for the crowned swans and compass of her family’s heraldry.  

Corvo feels uneasy about her speaking in public, but no more so than usual. He’s conversing with the guards standing before the stage, Jameson at his side. She watches him from the wings, reviewing her speech against the back of her teeth. The crowd seems anticipatory, milling about. She can hear the buzz of conversation from where she stands.

“—did you hear—”

“—my tailor said they would be finished later this week—”

“—but I want _another_ , mummy—”

“—news from Tyvia about—”

There isn’t enough for her to pick out a whole conversation from start to finish. She hears her own name. She hears Wyman’s name, too, and is glad for it. Jameson is the first to leave the gaggle, passing behind the curtains that block off the side of the stage. She sees Corvo turn from the guards at the front of the stage and come to the side of the platform, mounting it and then crossing to her.

“They’re ready for you,” he says. She nods, and dismisses him with a short gesture, trusting he will be but a few steps behind her and in reach, as he has always been.

The talk of the crowd swells to a crescendo as she walks to the podium, and then falls. Not silent—this is a city. But quiet enough that the speaker system that transmits her voice does not have to fight so hard to compete.

“Citizens of Dunwall,” she says, her words crisp and precise. She was trained in oration from the time she could speak; it doesn’t require much effort to make herself heard, even without a microphone. “I am pleased to announce that the sewer system has been completely purged of debris following the—”

No thought at all. She can speak on the sewage under her city for an hour if she so chose, but she doesn’t want to. But speaking on what’s been accomplished in repairing Dunwall since the last address is important. She takes the time to mention the men and women who cleared out the last portion, thanks them for their help. There was no loss of life, but she doesn’t mention that.

It’s when she’s moved to the rebuilding of the Parliamentary building—currently housed in a mansion the Crown purchased from the family who abandoned it during the coup—that she first sees an odd ripple back towards the end of the street, by where Boyle Industries has its office. The disruption is far enough back that she’s not even sure if it’s happening or just a distortion in the crowd.

She continues with her speech.

Someone is moving through the crowd, she thinks. Moving people out of the way, parting them, coming towards the stage. She can feel Corvo’s displeasure behind her. Perhaps it’s only her own hackles rising.

“—and I am pleased to announce—” she says, and the man is close enough now that she can hear him—that she can see him. Older, but a softer life than Sokolov, dressed well

“Praise Emily Kaldwin!” he shouts, and his face is beatific, lit by some unknown source. Somehow, their eyes meet over the distance. He waves his arm at her, grinning wide. Those nearest to him turn and look over their shoulders, frowning. One woman pulls her son closer to her, as if to shield him with her body.

Emily does not focus on him overlong. She cannot give him any of her attention; that will only encourage him. This has happened once or twice before, or something with a similar flavor. She is young and was unwed and unattached.

“—that the Financial District is to be the new site of—”

The sea of people around him has pulled away, giving him a halo of space unusual to the density of the crowd. He continues moving towards her, and they continue to part for him.

Corvo has already seen him and is making arrangements with the City Watch. Three officers have broken off from the foot of the stage and are wading their way to him.

He stops suddenly, and stares at her, compelling—and her own gaze slips from the crowd as a whole to him, just him, and it holds her between words.

His mouth opens, and she sees it moving before she actually hears what he yells above th din of the crowd.

“Blessed is she!”

The guards reach him, then, and attempt to encourage him to the side of the crowd, away from her, where Corvo can speak to him and assess if he’s only insane or in fact an actual, credible threat to her.

But he springs away from them, a mad dash to push himself through the crowd of people to her, and someone screams, and then the crowd is a roiling ocean of bodies.

Jameson reaches her first—he places his hand on her shoulder, and murmurs, “Time to go, I think,” and she turns her back on the crowd and follows him, her shoes clicking on the wooden platform and then the stairs. The Watch keeps the scant path from the area cleared for her speech to the Tower’s first gate empty of citizens, though she can hear them yelling and screaming from behind her, utter chaos. Jameson stays by her side the entire way, and she turns to him once the gate is barred behind them.

“A madman,” he says, simply.

“Not an assassin,” Emily says, and it isn’t a question once it’s left her mouth. Then she shakes her head, and they start walking again, deeper into the protection of the Tower’s shadow. His movements were all wrong. She can only suppose he must have been a distraction, but no one had come, and the crowd was now too great a mess to be used. She did not like the sounds she was hearing, though they disappeared once their huddle made it into the tower proper. There are guards, who she summons with the wave of a hand. Jameson stands aside to allow her to give her orders.

“The protector needs you,” she directs, and their commanding officer nods before leading them the way she and Jameson came.

Jameson watches them go, his hands held at the small of his back. When the room is clear, he turns to her, and holds his words on the tip of his tongue before he finally speaks.

“There will be repercussions from this,” he says. “Especially if there were deaths.”

Emily’s grimace has only him as witness. He’s right—it all comes back to control and image, and if she hadn’t flattered the Tvyians after she retook the throne, the murmurs about doing away with the monarchy entirely would have been much louder. As it was, too many were taken with the idea after it had come up while Delilah was still in power.

“‘If’”, Jameson,” she says, and hopes it is so.

* * *

 

Somehow, it _is_ so. The riot isn’t even front-page news on the Dunwall Courier.

Instead, her speech takes up most of the first page. The letters to the editor are mostly supportive when they come in scattershot over the next few days.

The man is captured, and a few days later, at breakfast, Corvo lets her know that he expired before any information could be had. He, of all people, knows what persuasion versus _persuasion_ is, and a raised eyebrow from Emily has Jameson clarifying, “Suicide. Poisoned,” with a cleared throat.

He looks embarrassed.

“He must have snuck it in,” Jameson hesitates, and Corvo nods. “We’re looking into gaps in security. We can’t have anything happening at the wedding.”

The next few weeks are a blur, enough of one that Emily forgets about the incident entirely in the storm of fittings and rehearsals and stolen dinners.

Jessamine never married, which means the only imperial Kaldwin wedding was of her grandfather to her grandmother, nearly fifty years ago. In theory, this means that there shouldn’t be much protocol to shackle Emily to tradition, but (as Callista would say) this means it is all the _more_ important to establish tradition, which means: she must do certain things with an unearned degree of pomp and circumstance.

Wyman looks charming in her uniform, the severeness of how her hair is pulled back from her face offset by her expression as she and Emily mount the steps of the platform erected in Holger Square. She looks like her mother, for all that she’s eskewed jewelry and anything but the most basic makeup. Oh, the tailoring is modern, and the fabric navy rather than black, but from anything but the first few rows, she is a Kaldwin empress in dark clothing and tall boots.

Wyman’s leather gloved hands hold hers as Khulan drones through his speech, and Emily thinks, ‘I should be listening better,’ but she doesn’t even try. She feels somewhere caught between floating and nauseous, even though she’d not eaten anything that morning other than a cup of coffee with heaped sugar. But when Khulan hands her the heavy pen to sign the marriage certificate, Emily’s hands do not shake. _Emily Drexel Lela Kaldwin_  is written without a single unlucky splotch of ink, and she hands the pen to Wyman, who signs her name with perhaps more of a flourish than Emily herself.

When she’s done, she reaches for Emily’s hand again, and gives it a firm squeeze. They’re supposed to keep their attention on Khulan, who lifts the paper for the crowd to see, but Emily only has eyes for Wyman, steady, patient Wyman, who has stood like a rock through everything, and stands beside her now.

‘Thank you’ isn’t enough, but as they walk to the edge of the platform together, to look out first ver the rows of seated nobility and then the teeming crowd beyond the gate, Emily figures that it’s a good place to start. They’ll have the rest of their lives to figure out the particulars.


	6. Chapter 6

Fillmore raps the base of the windmill with his boot, startling a nearby gull into flight, and says, “Well, we aren’t Karnaca, but it’s something.”

Emily agrees. It rises out of the shallow waters of the harbor like a limb clawing at the sky, the blades lazily rotating, catching power and bringing it back to the center of the city, staving off the need for whale oil for several blocks of street lights. Come winter, and not just this fall chill, they’ll be able to use it to heat homes. Bird circle lazily above the high blades, undisturbed by the intrusion.

“Further inland,” Fillmore continues, “we’ve got wheels in the rivers; same principal. If a town’s got a good strong current, it takes care of most of their needs. Now while it ain’t— isn’t— a good replacement for oil in all cases, it’s a good start, at least until the bright young things at the Academy come up with something better.”

“They will,” Emily says. The prize is massive for the next natural philosopher who wants to play Sokolov or Roseburrow. She lowers her hand from her brow where it had served to shield her from the sun, and tucks it into her coat pockets. “I’ve seen enough, we can leave.”

This section of the docks has been cordoned off, with an old slaughterhouse refurbished to serve as the headquarters for this and the other windmills coming in the next few months, the whole compound surrounded by electrified fencing, and serviced mainly by a carriage track leading through the main gate. The security is mostly to protect the windmills from vandals than malicious sabotage. A scant handful of weeks after her wedding and Emily, as Jameson assures her, is still riding the propaganda high. She and Wyman are putting in double the number of public appearances that they normally would, some together, some apart. Wyman is with some guild or another at the moment, doubtlessly exchanging charming anecdotes and fitting right in.

Meanwhile, Emily is stuck at the edge of what used to be the Slaughterhouse District, privately touring the prototype compound for the windmills. She looks up, watching the blades rotate lazily for a moment more, before she turns back to Fillmore and Lippincott.

The first bird that flies into the charged fence pops and sizzles in a burst of white light, and Emily whips her head around at the noise, so much like a Wall of Light. The smell of charred feathers, altogether too much like burning hair, hits her and she feels nausea rising before the stink is swept away by the sea breeze.

But that is only the first.

They slam into the high fence not fifteen feet from their group like so much hail hitting a roof, one after another. She sees the grey plumage and yellow-orange beaks of gulls and the black tufts of terns, and what might be the massive wingspan of an albatross.

“Come along,” Fillmore says, and Emily would say he almost sounds nervous. Still, she turns her head to look at him rather than the spectacle.

“Why are they…?” she asks, trailing off. Emily pulls the fur collar of her coat tighter around her face as Fillmore offers her his hand to board the waiting carriage.

“I reckon it’s the fish,” Fillmore says, and Emily turns her head as she steps up to see the water before the pier. In the tiny inlet, the water is frothing like it’s boiling, the sun glinting off flailing scales. A hagfish manages enough of a thrash to end up on the pier, and it writhes back and forth, great fanged mouth opening and closing on nothing but unbreathable air.

“Get in, your majesty,” Lippincott says, backing up to hold the door for her, and Emily takes her seat, Lippincott hurrying inside after her and pulling the door shut.

Emily tugs back the curtain, determined to witness whatever is causing the fish and birds to behave so, but the next bang shakes the carriage itself and she falls back. Fillmore goes for the pistol at his hip, tense.

The engine should have sparked by now, the carriage ought to have lurched forward on the track and begun the journey back to the Tower, but it does not. Ten seconds turn into thirty, and Emily focuses on the two people sitting opposite from her. None of them are in control.

“Are we going to wait it out?” Emily finally demands.

“Majesty,” Lippincott protests, but looks to Fillmore.

“We’re not ten yards from the gate,” Emily argues. “We can’t stay here.”

She doesn’t have the words to describe what’s happening outside. None of them do, and putting the words to it will make it something too real rather than an oddity. Lippincott is from country stock, more likely than Fillmore or Emily to ascribe to superstitions. Her lips move, she isn’t speaking, and she’s looking at the sliver of window rather than Emily.

Emily doesn’t quite think she’s reciting the Strictures.

“On three?” Fillmore says, closing his hand on the door opposite to the one they used to enter. “One…”

Another bang, and all three of them flinch.

Fillmore’s voice is steady. “Two. Three!”

He opens the door, and Emily moves quickly, near flinging herself out of the carriage, going at a run for the gate. She hasn’t moved like this since Delilah’s fall or out of the Void, and she feels too vulnerable, all too aware of what’s happening at her back as she dashes for the guardhouse by the gate. It’s unmanned, and Emily uses the open window to clamor inside, slamming her first down on the button that opens the gate before vaulting back out. Fillmore reaches for her hand to yank her forward the last few feet, and the gates clang shut behind them.

Lippincott, wide-eyed, stands a few paces further out than Fillmore. She stares at the two of them, wide eyed, white faced and her chest rising and falling in too-rapid breathing.

“Pull yourself together, girl,” Fillmore hisses, bending over, hands on his knees, chest heaving. “Outsider’s balls, I’m not meant for this. I’m just a businessman.”

Emily looks behind her, expecting to see a pile of avian corpses scattered across the yard or perhaps a whole flock about to descend on them, but there’s nothing. The smell of burnt feathers is still in the wind, and there is proof in the faint form of the white feathered corpse visible between the wheels of the carriage, still stalled on the track.

But all of that is behind the gate, now locked, and here _they_  are.

“We’ll have to walk,” she says, grim. Holger Square isn’t more than a half-hour away, and Yul will be able to contact the Tower, or at the very least allow them use of the Abbey’s carriage. There will doubtless be members of the Watch between here and the Square, but Emily is unfamiliar with any members of the Watch that joined since the coup, which is the greater portion.

“This part of the city has been quiet,” she says to the only member of the Watch in the group, “but you should take off your jacket.”

Lippincott nods, and takes off her holster first. Emily reaches for it, glancing around the surrounding area. She can hear the noise of the busier thoroughfares, but for now, this quiet alley is just that. Not yet touched by the rebuilding efforts, the guard presence during previous weeks while the outpost was being set up seems to have discouraged occupation now.

The other woman takes off her coat, holding it draped over her arm with care. The red fabric is pristine, and it’s not because Lippincott skirts her duty. Fillmore is the one to take it from her and ball it up, tossing it in the muck at the side of the road.

“Harness too,” he says, grim, and the leather belts receive the same treatment.

Naturally, Emily will have them replaced, and the hasty disguising doesn’t extend to the other woman’s well-ironed shirt or her shined boots. Still, neither of those is Watch-issue, and all three of them are likely to be recognized as ladies going slumming with a guard than one Lord Fillmore, the Empress, and one of her personal guard.

Emily shields the lower half of her face with the turned collar of her shirt, and longs for the mask currently laying on one of the tables in her safe room.

“Do you still remember this part of the city?” she asks Fillmore as they walk, nearly shoulder to shoulder, with Lippincott at their back.

“Aye,” Fillmore admits. “Delilah couldn’t outfox the gangs in this area. Probably was planning to raze the area but never got the chance. Turn right.”

They follow his directions, and within a few minutes of picking their way through the streets, they approach a widening street with proper storefronts. It’s poor, if orderly. The proximity to the Abbey guarantees that much. Fillmore offers her his arm and she takes it, settling her gloved hand into the crook of his elbow.

Emily hunches further into her collar, and listens to the sound of Fillmore’s well-heeled boots click on the cobblestones beside her, looking down rather than up. Gazing about like a moonstruck noble won’t do her much good, only draw further attention, and she hopes that Lippincott has the sense not to do so.

A rat dashes across her path, stark white against the cobblestones, and Emily startles, her grip tightening on Fillmore’s elbow. Her abbreviated view is bothersome, and she looks up from the street to a man sweeping his front steps.

He’s unremarkable. She’s never seen him before; she knows nothing about him, his shop, his family. But he’s paid for his food and his rent with coins stamped with her face for more than a decade, and it takes only a second for him to realize, and stop sweeping.

Fillmore looks from him to her, and says low, “Come along, lass,” and he walks a little faster. Emily glues her focus to the ground, and as they walk past the man proper, she doesn’t look up to get the measure of the rest of his reaction.

She doesn’t need to. She can guess. His startle will be noticed by one of his neighbors, and then they’ll take a closer look, and _know_ , and so on. If they can reach the end of the block, if they can break the chain of the reaction or keep someone from shouting out, then they can make it to Holger Square and Yul.

(This would be so much easier if they went by rooftop, Emily thinks.)

“We’re being followed, miss,” Lippincott offers, leaning in closer. Fillmore curses under his breath, and Emily feels him shift his hand closer to his pocket.

They cross the street, avoiding a puddle, and it’s only once they’re across that she hears a voice call out. It’s a child’s, it has to be, high and unbroken, shouting, “Empress Emily!”

“Hurry now,” Fillmore says, and Emily raises her head to better watch where they’re going, all three pairs of feet moving quickly. But now the street is aware, women and men looking up from their shopping or cutting conversations off to watch the three of them move down the block.

“Empress!” Another voice calls out, and then someone ahead echoes it. A woman steps down off her stoop ahead of them, right into their path. She stares at Emily unabashedly as she passes, Fillmore pulling her around, only to bump into a man not five steps later.

“Excuse us,” he says, but now there’s three behind Emily herself, and more coming to stand shoulder to shoulder with the man. Beyond him, another, and more coming closer, swarming, and Emily can almost see the gates of Holger Square around the next corner.

“Empress,” one man says, and “Bless you, Empress Emily,” comes from the woman beside him. Someone tugs at her cuff, and Emily looks to see a small boy by her side, staring at her with wide eyes. Fillmore’s stalled, caught in the tide of people, attempting to shoulder his way past. Emily releases his arm to better stand back to back, braced against one another in the sea of people. They press against her, imploring faces, reaching hands. She’s lost track of Lippincott in the crush.

She’s worried the boy is going to be trampled, small as he is. The crowd doesn’t seem like they’re about to riot, but so many bodies in so tight a space never ends well. She can only see a sea of heads and hats, and someone steps on her booted foot, hard, and Fillmore is yelling for order, for her, as someone finally manages to wedge between the two of them and drive them apart.  
  
Emily jerks forward, caught off balance, but a hand closes on the back of her coat and prevents her from smashing her forehead into some man’s noise. As he startles back, a voice near her ear hisses.

“Take off your coat,” he says, and Emily nods and shrugs if off with a roll of her shoulders. The man drapes his arm over her bared shoulders and ducks her down, sliding under the reaching arms and between the press of bodies. He drapes his own coat over her head, and the two of them fight their way out of the writhing sea of people together, the man making judicious use of his elbows and a few hard stomps.

They break into fresh air, or at the very least a side alley, and the man pulls her behind a dumpster to catch her breath and remove his coat, which he drapes around her shoulders.

“Are you alright?” he asks, looking her over. Emily’s ribs are tender, and she raises a hand to feel the empty lobe of one ear; someone tore one of the baubles out.

“I’m fine,” she says. She knows the pain of a broken rib; what she feels isn’t that.

“Who _are_ you?” she follows, squinting at the man. He’s build more like a sprinter than a brawler, maybe a few years older than Jameson and her, dressed nondescript in dark clothes. Cut short, his hair is ruffled, but she’ll blame that on the crowd rather than his personal habits. Hers is likely a mess as well. She won’t be surprised if her barrette has gone the way of her earring. Corvo’s training tells her he’s probably got a knife hidden in his pocket, but she doesn't look at him and think _threat_.

“A friend,” he says. “I promise. You were trying to get to the Overseers?”

Emily isn’t entirely pacified by his promise, but what choice does she have. Besides, his voice sounds familiar, even if she can’t place it. Maybe he’s one of Jameson’s agents, his voice from an audiograph, but still one of the mass she hasn’t met.   
  
“Yes,” she admits, eyes wary. If she’s wrong, if he goes for the knife…

“It’s not far,” he says, already turning. “Follow me. Your friends will be able to fight their way out, but we don’t want to be found and attract the mob again.”

She doesn’t have Fillmore’s intimate knowledge of the area and never ranged this far during her nighttime runs, so she follows. The man makes use of the back alleys rather than the busier streets, turning only twice and hesitating on just a single turn. And, she thinks, if he tried something, the anonymity of these shadowed places would be favorable to using her Mark.

But he’s as good as his word.

They twist out of a side street and Emily sees the high metal of the gate even before the red banners strung up along the Office’s pillars. Still, she doesn’t run. Two Overseers stand before the opened door, and as often as she visits Yul or is visited by him, she doesn’t know if these two have accompanied him, know her. The masks strip away all individuality. Besides her, the man inhales sharply, and Emily glances over at him.

He shrugs, and stares when she pauses, shrugging off his coat and offering it back to him. She touches her hair, and yes, the jeweled barrette is missing. She wishes the luck of it to whose ever prying fingers stole it. She has more; maybe it will do them some good.

Emily twists her hair back up into order, and again touches the lobe of her ear.

“Am I bleeding?” she asks, and the man shakes his head.

She takes the orphaned earring out, and offers it to him.

“For playing guide,” she offers, and again he shakes his head, hands in his coat.

“I did it to help,” he says, and Emily shrugs, tucking her hand back into her trouser pocket and dropping the earring in.

“Is this where you take your chivalrous leave?” she asks, smoothing out her blouse. She looks out of sorts, smears of muck on the cuff of her trousers and blouse, but not seriously damaged. It might take a moment for the Overseers to recognize her, but they will.

“I’d like to stay with you until I’m sure you’re safe,” the man ventures, and Emily shrugs. “If you’d like.”

He follows like Lippincott had, at her back and to the left, if more practiced; she doesn’t hear his footfalls on the cobblestones. Like Corvo, she thinks, and dismisses the thought as the Overseers perk up at the approach of two strangers.

“Empress Emily to see High Overseer Khulan,” Emily states calmly, stopping at the base of the stairs. Then, she waits.

She isn’t sure how it works for others, but this utter ease was one of Jessamine’s lessons, not Corvo’s. Enough confidence will open all doors. Let others trip over their words while you stay silent.

She holds her head high, and lets her face speak for her, as it did with the crowd.

“Ma’am,” the one on the right says, not taking chances. His comrade turns to look at him, then back at the Office.

“The Empress has business with the High Overseer,” the man says, from behind her shoulder.

“A moment,” says the more discerning one, before looking back. “Brother, stay with our guests while I go inside.”

“Certainly,” the other says, still looking straight.

Her rescuer steps forward, shoulder to shoulder with Emily. She glances at him, surprised to find him biting the inside his cheek to ward off what she suspects is a smile.

Comeuppance is a joy, and she will enjoy it, but the Overseers can hardly be faulted for following protocol. Just as Emily had needed to draw from the daughters of the upper classes for new officers of the Watch, the Abbey in Gristol had moved Overseers from the rest of the Isles here. If they are slow to move for the fear of Delilah lurking in their minds still, Emily can be patient.

When the door opens a handful of minutes later, Khulan is there, and the Overseer who went in to fetch him follows behind. Emily, fearless, mounts the steps and meets him at the gate.

“High Overseer,” she says, “Do you have a moment?”

Khulan, unmasked, wearing the red surplus of his office, does not question her outside, but his eyes pick up on Emily’s lack of a coat, then dart to the man behind her.

“The Abbey always has time for the throne,” he says, and turns to go back inside. When the Overseer makes to follow, Khulan frowns, and waves him back into place at the gate.

Emily follows sedately behind Khulan, who takes the stairs to his office two at a time. Now, she hears the man walking behind her, or he allows her to, and the three of them end up in Khulan’s office soon enough. It is exactly as she remembers it from nearly two months before, down to the placement of the papers on his desk. Out of courtesy, she does not look at them. Out of courtesy, Khulan doesn’t bother shuffling them or tucking them away. Such is their relationship.

Khulan takes his chair, and Emily hers, and Khulan rests his elbows on the table, waiting. They are not at the Tower. The rules favor him here, when she has imposed upon his time.

“Lord Fillmore and I were at the new windmill installation down by the docks. We were about to leave when—” Emily recalls superstitious Lippincott’s terrified face, and her own horror at the fish and birds, and stalls. No. She cannot hide it from him, she saw the broken bodies after the deluge, and if Khulan sends people to investigate (which he will, she came here; he is involved) he will find at least the birds. Here is the balance she strikes. “When a bird flew into the fence. Then there were more, and we ran for the carriage. It was frightening at the time.”

She sounds too much like a child with the excuse, and she closes her eyes, brows drawing up. Emily leans back in her chair.

“One hit the carriage itself. We made for the gate after we found the carriage to have stalled, and once outside, resolved to walk here to ask for aid. I was recognized, and separated from Lord Fillmore and my guard, and made my way here with the help of—”

“Thomas,” the man volunteers.

“With Thomas’ help,” she finishes. “Yul, can you have a message sent to the Tower? We will be missed, and I would rather Wyman and my father not shut the city down for my sake.”

“Certainly,” Khulan says, and stands, pushing himself back from the desk. Thomas’ eyes track the engraved Strictures around the edge, but he moves out of the way easily to allow Khulan to pass. “I’ll do so right now.”

The door closes, leaving Emily and Thomas alone. She glances over her shoulder at him, and he, once more hiding his grin poorly, shrugs.

“My guard noticed someone following us before the crowd formed,” she says. “Was that you?”

“Yes,” Thomas admits. “I’ve been following you for a few days.”

“Why?” Emily asks, and Thomas says, “Because Billie asked me to.”

They let that sit between them until Khulan comes back.

“Corvo and Wyman are on their way,” he says, and settles himself back behind his desk.

“Thank you, Yul,” Emily says.

“It’s nice to know the throne will reach to the Abbey for help,” he says. “Would you like some tea?”

When Corvo and Wyman join them, they’re speaking over tea. At Corvo’s entrance, Thomas stands, and Corvo’s attention is torn from Emily to Thomas, who says, “Sir.”

Wyman, meanwhile, takes Emily’s hands, crouching beside her chair.

“You’re alright?” her consort says, and Emily nods.

“I’m fine, Wyman, they didn’t want to hurt me, they wanted to see me.”

“You could have been seriously injured,” Corvo cuts in, his attention sliding from Thomas. “Officer Lippincott failed to keep you safe.”

“I am _fine_ ,” she says, turning to look behind her chair at her father, and setting her cup and saucer down on Khulan’s desk.

He knows— both of them know— that should it come to it, she will use the Mark. She has not yet had to.

Wyman bends her head to kiss Emily’s ring, and rises back to her feet.

“Was anyone injured? Did it turn into a riot?” Emily asks.

“No,” Khulan says, holding his cup. “I sent Overseers in, and they said nothing was amiss. There was talk about your appearance, but little else.”

“And Azariah and Lippincott?”

“Both safe,” this from Wyman, who folds her arms. “They arrived at the Tower not long before we got your message. Officer Lippincott is shaken, and Lord Fillmore is boiling-mad.”

“What happened?” Corvo asks. “Yul’s not told us.”

Khulan takes a drink of his tea, and Emily explains again.

“Huh. I wonder if the windmill disturbed the birds,” Wyman mused, and Emily will take that explanation and not think any more of it.

Corvo frowns, mostly at the floor, and then turns his attention on Thomas.

“Who are you?”

“Thomas,” Thomas says. He stands easily at rest with the hands at the small of his back. “Thomas Jordan. Meagan sent me. She said you,” looking at Emily, “needed a new Royal Protector.”

Khulan looks pensive, thumbing his chin.

“Well, how fortunate,” he says.

“I don’t recall being asked,” Corvo cuts in, laying his hand on the desk, staring Thomas down. Wyman looks between the two of them and places her hand on the back of Emily’s chair.

“Father,” Emily says. “You can’t.”

When Corvo looks at her, Emily holds his gaze. This is a plan she’s held close to her heart for weeks, unable to make it happen before now. Wyman and Billie are the only two she’s discussed it with.

“You’re getting older,” she says. “And I can’t have my Royal Protector as my spymaster too. It’s too much for one man. You’ve been training Jameson for nearly a decade, now, and if Meagan sent Thomas,” who nods at this point, helpful, “then he’s capable. You can test him if you want to. I don’t need you here. I need you in Karnaca. I’m going to make you the Duke.”

“I have no choice in the matter,” Corvo says, and Emily nods.

“You don’t,” she says. 


	7. Chapter 7

Karnaca hasn’t changed a bit since Billie was last here. Oh, they’re cleaning up the very worst parts of it in preparation for the arrival of the new Duke, but beyond Corvo’s face on too many flyers, Karnaca is Karnaca, and Billie’s just fine with that.

The Wale is docked at a mid-range marina for medium-sized ships, comfortably wedged between a fishing trawler in for repairs and a pleasure craft purchased by an older woman who lives on it. As neighbors go, they’re the sort that Billie prefers. They keep to themselves, but the woman has offered Billie her extra catch when she’s seen her on the dock.

Emily had asked why she was going to Karnaca, and leaving her behind had been bitter for Billie. But Billie was comfortable with bitterness, and turning the requests of nobles down, and Emily, formerly spoilt, had taken ‘no’ far better than she had when she was ten and Billie’d met her for the first time.

Their last conversation lingered more in Billie’s mind than for just being a goodbye. Emily’s obvious discomfort with some unnamed thing the black-eyed bastard had done lingered in Billie’s mind like a splinter under her nails.

Now, leaning against the railing of the Wale, she looks out over the harbor and lets the thoughts circle. Picking at her fingernails, she writes off the unease by reminding herself that Thomas should be with Emily now. The odd feeling in the pit of her stomach can be written off. Her nightmares as of late aren’t even _about_  Emily. Just a strange, too real and only half remembered haze where she’s wandering through the alleys near Silton’s estate, blinded and clutching onto a stump where her right arm used to be.

The stars over the harbour are bright and clear without the haze of Dunwall’s smoke. Even the dust can’t obscure them. She supposes it’s the better view of the two.

Sighing, Billie turns her back on the water and makes for her cabin. Even if her sleep is going to be fitful, she needs it. The trail is cold, but maybe she’ll turn up something new.

She sheds her overcoat and drapes it over the back of her desk chair. Her hands fall on the desk as she hunches over it, stares over the scattering of information she’s gathered in the last few weeks. Thomas’ warning rings in her mind. She can almost understand his bitterness. Daud had flung the Whalers off like a dog shaking water from his back, and for what? A clean break? Hardly clean if he had just kept doing what he’d done all along, just without two dozen dependants who'd worshiped the ground he walked on.

She turns her head to look at the shoddy chest of drawers in the corner before crossing to it in barely a step. Maybe she should take Emily’s room; this one is miniscule, packed tight between the bed and the desk and the dresser.

But at the same time, it suits her.

Billie pulls open the dresser and digs through layers of folded shirts until she feels the smoothness of fine grain leather. When she pulls the jacket free and lays it flat, she shivers, the unseen weight of something else on her shoulders. The black elbow-length gloves and the scarf tumble out, and she bends to retrieve them from the floor and lay them alongside the jacket.

It still fits, she thinks. She hasn’t gained or lost that much weight since she last wore it, even if she’s just left it buried in the drawn since then. She’s lucky that the leather hasn’t cracked.

Slowly, she undoes buttons, opens it like a flayed rib cage. The gloves go on first, then the jacket, one arm after the other into the sleeves, and then the row of buttons. The scarf she tucks in against her throat, right up to the final button of the jacket.

It still fits like a second skin.

Billie stares at the top of her dresser. There’s a cracked mirror on her desk. If she turns, she’ll see herself, done up. She doesn’t know what she expected, putting the uniform on. That it would magically give her insight on where Daud was? That it would be—

“Different?”

She spins on her heel, palming her waist for a knife she knows isn’t there. Sitting on her bed is the Outsider himself, hunched over, knees spread with his hands between them. Around him flicker shards of the Void like cut glass, reality fraying at the pressure of him, and Billie snarls.

“What the _fuck_  are you doing here?”

He seems more occupied with staring at the floor than her; won’t even do her the courtesy of meeting her eyes with his hollow ones.

“The Void isn’t what the Abbey thinks it is, Billie Lurk. It isn’t the gutter beyond the world, but a place all its own; far larger, far more complex. Delilah walked there as she would through the streets, and she was hardly the first or the last to do so. Few make it there in the flesh, and the visits of the dreaming are far less likely to be hazardous to their health.”

“You never come to anyone without a reason,” she hisses. “What do you want from me?”

She isn’t dreaming. Billie remembers walking down from the deck moments ago perfectly. Daud had never said anything about the Outsider appearing to him outside of his dreams. He’s between her and the door, and she isn’t even sure the knife hidden on the underside of her desk would do anything to him.

The Outsider makes as if to stand, but dissolves into those shame shards, which swirl in eddies like so many bloodflies. Before he returns, she grabs for the knife like a child reaching for a security blanket while his voice booms out around her.

“I’m used to people asking _me_ for things. Emily took my mark,” he says. “But you’d refuse it.”

“Absolutely, you black-eyed bastard,” she hisses, eyes darting as she tries to find him. The cabin is small. There are only so many places he could appear.

She only has a moment of warning with the shards scattered in the air whistling before he reappears with his hand around her left wrist.

“I won’t give you my mark,” he says, calm.

She shoves his shoulder before he even fully materializes, but it’s like all her strength is nothing, and he closes his other hand around it too.

“What? What are you—” And then she yells, in pain and fear, as something soaks down to the marrow of her bones, and she feels what she felt in that nightmare, the absense, the pain.

It burns, and she drops her knife even as she scrambles to pull his hand off.

“But I’ll give you back something you lost.”

The pain in her arm is outshone by that in her eye as he presses his palm to her face. It’s agony, and yet it’s not, overwhelming until she only feels numb, and then it’s over. The sudden absence shocks her, and she reaches to touch her face and sees— she doesn’t know what she sees, can’t immediately identify it as her arm, her hand, even as the fingers made of stone, the bones replaced by something otherwordly, Void-forsaken cold metal.

He lets her go, and Billie stumbles and falls, heaving in breaths. She touched her eye with her flesh hand and feels cold stone.

“Time fractured around you, imbedded splinters of paradox into everything you are. I’ve torn them out, but everything has a price. Setting you back on your path without an arm or eye after Emily returned them to you would hardly be fair, would it?” he says, and his tone seems nearly playful.

The Outsider stands above her, looking down.

“I gave Daud a name more than a decade ago to see what he’d do with it. Now, it’s your turn. One final gift, to make it a set of three. Find Martha Cottings.”  
And he disappears as he came, dissolves, and takes all the cold and the air in the cabin with him.

Billie’s heart is still beating panic-fast even as she remembers how to breathe again, as her flesh hand fastens around the one the Outsider forced on her. He took her _arm_ , her _eye_. Standing takes the better remainder of her strength as she stands and snags the cracked mirror on her desk to stare at her face.

Where her eye once was now sat a chunk of stone, glowing red and terrible at the center.

She drops the mirror and slumps back on the floor, head against the leg of the desk.

“Fuck,” she says to an empty cabin, and then bangs her new, terrible hand on the floor for good measure. “Fuck!”

The pain is quickly fading to a memory, and in its place is the weighty feeling of arcane strength and augmented wellness, like when Daud’s powers had still been shared with the Whalers. She feels like she could do anything, run as fast and far as she needed to, and her thoughts are crystal clear.

“Martha Cottings,” she said, to her empty ship. “I don’t know who the fuck you are, but I guess I’m going to have to learn.”

Slumped against the furniture of her own cabin, she decided it could wait until she morning, and rose on shaky knees to fall onto the bed.

Maybe now that they’d proved themselves an omen, the nightmares would let up.

* * *

As it turned out, Billie didn’t need to look hard to find out who Martha Cottings was. Being in Karnaca certainly didn’t hurt. The name had sounded familiar, and it hadn’t taken long to realize why.

She doesn’t have the resources she would have had in Dunwall, no spymaster to make a request of, no Empress to smooth the way. Billie will have to rely on footwork to get the job done, and if there’s any place that’ll have the information she needs, it’ll be Karnaca’s main library.

The Royal Conservatory itself had been closed off by the Abbey, but the library was a block or two away, and severely neglected by the former Duke and Ashworth both. Ashworth had taken all the books with even a hint of arcane knowledge for her own use, meaning the Abbey’s interest was only cursitory and left it poorly guarded.  
She breaks in easily, sneaking in through a skylight and sneaking down to the reference desk. Martha Cottings wasn’t important enough to earn an index card of her own, she remembers the announcement of the woman’s murder (reading between the lines to pick up on the arcane bent of the incident that caused it) and finding the obituary in the back copies of the Dunwall Courier sets her on the right path.

They tell the rest of the short story of the life of Martha Cottings. It mirrored Corvo’s own; born in Karnaca, picked out for exceptional service, moved to Dunwall to serve the crown.

And then she died in the line of duty, fighting the gangs, nearing four years ago, her body reduced to ash alongside an estate that spanned half a city block, preventing even the dignity of a state funeral for the woman rumored as training to be the next Royal Protector. And so Corvo hadn’t retired, caught in the double-bind of spymaster and protector both.

Maybe things would have been different if Martha hadn’t died. The more she reads in the shuttered darkness of the library, the more the thought buries itself in her skull.

But how is she supposed to prevent the death of a woman years reduced to ash?

As loathe as she is to follow the Outsider’s guidance (the next time they meet, she won’t be caught unaware or unarmed, Billie promises herself that) she knows well enough that to ignore it would be moronic, even if she knows there’ll be a catch along the way. What matters now is what’ll be extracted of her in the following, and the thought makes her new ill-begotten additions burn.

Her new arm is heavy in a way she can’t quite put into words. When she doesn’t think about it, her fingers move the way she wants them to, and they turn pages well enough. There’s something thrumming through her, like when she’d been a brand new Whaler and had been learning to transverse, but she doesn’t want to follow the feeling.

It happens when she’s returning the copies of the paper to their proper place, some of Sokolov’s obsession with detail guiding her hands. Flesh responds as flesh does, but her stone fingers are still unsuited for fine detail. She closes the drawer with too much strength, and Billie winces at the sound, too loud in an empty room, a rookie’s mistake. The force shakes the shelf, and a higher book, apparently placed with less care, tumbles back and toward the floor. Billie makes a grab for it with her new hand, unthinking, determined, _reaching_ —

She meets resistance. She shoves past it with her fingertips, shoves _through_ , the air tearing like so much wet tissue as the seam of the world splits, blue and sparking at the edges.

The book hits the floor spine first, falling open to a random page, and Billie Lurk stands, her hand to the wrist in a hole in the world.


	8. Chapter 8

Emily looks at herself in the mirror.

She is seen and known wherever she goes. There are those that have never and will never meet her in the flesh that know her face better than their own.

But her nude body is private. She can count on less than the fingers of both hands the number of people who have seen her bare since childhood, and on one hand those that were not for medical reasons or close household staff, and even then, not entirely stripped.

Corvo, for necessity. Billie, because the Wale had been so small and fresh bathing water a commodity. Wyman, her lover.

And the Outsider.

The wood floor is cold against her bare feet, and she keeps her legs closed for the extra warmth. The Month of Rain always heralds the coming of the winter, and the mornings will see frost on the windows next week, if Emily’s estimation is correct. Gooseflesh prickles over her skin, but Emily looks at her own reflection in the mirror, who is neutral in all of this and reflects only reality.

The reality is the image of her body. Here is the scar on her right shoulder from a Clockwork, who had moved so fast the first time she’d engaged one, unaware of their almost preternatural speed. There was the drag of a scar along her calf from a rooftop run. There, on the back of her left hand, is the Mark. She could stare at her reflection for hours and map all the things she’d picked at when she was growing into Corvo’s height and Jessamine’s proportions, which had not blended together gracefully and had made training difficult.

Her focus is not on any of those features, but on her stomach. Emily turns sideways to see if the view is any less damning from that angle. It is a small thing, and could be mistaken for an overindulgence in tarts. And considered entirely out of context of anything else, it might be, but it doesn’t stand alone.

Emily settles her left hand on her belly, feeling the odd firmness of her stomach.

“Why won’t you talk to me?” she says, trusting the words to the empty room, even if they don’t reach the ears she intends them to.

Her Mark does nothing in response.

Her are the facts, as she has them: she can tally up her symptoms of fatigue and tenderness in her breasts and the weight gain and a lack of her monthly courses to one simple fact. She is pregnant.

Unlike her mother, she is married. Like her mother, she is the Empress, upon whom the Isles rest.

Emily cannot look at herself much longer in the mirror, and turns her back on it, taking instead the clothes she abandoned over the sink and putting them back on. Her blouse is tighter than it was, but not ill-fitting, and her pants high-waisted. Her jacket covers even the suggestion of a swell. For now, she can hide the symptoms. She might even rid herself of the problem entirely, if she chose to do so.

She finishes dressing, but for her gloves, and spares a moment to check her now clothed reflection in the smaller mirror over the sink. She is too pale, she thinks. Wyman will immediately know something is wrong.

The last piece of her outfit is the that which covers her Mark. Emily takes the white calfskin gloves from the side of the sink, and pulls them on with care. They fit like a second skin, and always will, even as the rest of her body mutates beyond her familiarity with it.

Assembled, she pulls open the door and enters the bedroom, turning slowly for inspection.

“Well,” she says. “How do I look?”

Wyman, sitting on the bed, looks up from her book, and smiles.

“As beautiful as ever.” Her hands close the book, but she keeps it in her lap, fidgeting with it, her fingers tracing over the spine.

“How’s your leg feeling?” Emily asks.

“Meagan’s exercises are helping,” she admits, looking at Emily’s boots rather than Emily. She grins, and looks like she used to before the coup, her face lit with sunshine, even indoors. She used to see it so often. This is the first time in more than a year.

“Maybe after the dinner, I can see _under_ your pretty clothes.”

“I’m pregnant,” she rushes out.

The hesitant joy melts from Wyman’s face, leaving it pale. Emily’s heart beats in her throat, and she could be sick from it. Time stretches between them, both women unmoving.

“We had discussed...” Wyman hesitates, stringing the words out like beads. “But I didn’t think you meant to do it so soon.”

‘You’. Not us.

“I did not think,” Emily agrees, the truth bitter in her mouth. Now, she backtracks, strides suddenly to the window, seized by the desire to move, to not look at Wyman and too look at the Wrenhaven instead. She hears the scrape of her chair on the floor and feels the burn of her wife’s eyes on her back.

She flinches at the touch of Wyman’s fingers on her back. The harbour is busy today, and she follows the path of a ship as it comes into port.

“Who?” Wyman asks.

“Nobody,” which is true on technicalities if the same sort of answer that Emily would rage at if she were the one receiving it.

But Wyman’s always been a better person.

“When?” she asks, in the same even tone.

“About four months ago.”

“The Fugue?”

The seagulls scream and careen through the air, and Emily bites back the fear that they might dive at the window.

“Yes.” Or thereabouts. That’s the math everyone else is going to be doing, the sum they’re going to arrive at. And she’s not sure if they’re wrong to come to that conclusion.

“Okay,” Wyman says. “We’ll talk to Jameson. Get out ahead of this. We’ve got time. We can do this.”

“I don’t want your _permission_ , Wyman,” she hisses, her anger magnified in the absence of Wyman’s own. She should feel betrayed, enraged, she should be asking more questions than the gentle ones, offering practical solutions. Her shoulders tremble, and she grips the railing _hard_.

Wyman’s hand is steady on her back.

“I— we have other options,” she says, after a moment, more to the Wrenhaven than to Wyman. “And it’s easy enough still that the choice could be taken from me.”

Emily turns back slowly to her wife and consort. Wyman purposefully shakes her head. Her hand falls away, and she clasps both of them at the small of her back. She was always better with the court politics than Emily herself.

“We were always going to do this,” Wyman says. “Differently, maybe, but you would have always needed an heir. How silly of us to throw away one nearly ready made. And better to announce it before Duke Attano leaves.”

Emily squares her shoulders.

Wyman’s voice is low, and she leans in to speak. When she reaches for Emily’s hand to squeeze it, Emily squeezes back, her gloves against Wyman’s unmarked skin.

“Do you want me to call for Jameson?”

“No,” she says.

Her hands are the ones that open the doors to the royal apartments, startling the officer outside them— but not Thomas, who cleaned up nicely once put into a fine woolen suit and given a pistol and sword suited to the Royal Protector.

“Fetch Duke Attano and Lord Curnow,” to the guard, who salutes smartly and goes to do so. To Thomas, it’s only, “Come inside.”

Thomas’ face, unlike Corvo’s, is terribly expressive, as if he’s unaccustomed to needing to hide his expressions. She gets treated to the eyebrow raise of curiosity as he passes her to enter the apartments, and watches her with a cocked her while she closes the door.

“What is it?” he asks, and in that way, he is like Corvo.

Wyman gestures her close— and then gestures to her desk chair. Emily frowns, but takes it, and realizes this is the new normal. Or it will be, fussing and commentary on her. More than what she already suffers through. She sits, and leans into the back of the chair, and watches Wyman and Thomas watch her.

“We’ll wait for my father,” she says. “I don’t feel like saying it twice.”

Thomas looks to Wyman, like she’ll give him a hint, but Wyman is steadfast, eyes on the window, and Thomas turns his attention back to Emily.

“Lord Attano is finishing his packing,” Thomas recites. He’s settling in, learning the schedules and workings of the Tower. “But he’ll be fast to come, once the guard says you asked for him.”

She stretches her legs out, crosses them at the ankles, and counts in her own head. Let Thomas and Wyman fidget in the silence.

At one hundred fourteen, there’s a knock on the door. Thomas answers it, nodding at Corvo as he enters, Jameson behind him, but Jameson is the only one to return the gesture.

“Close the door,” she says, and Thomas does.

“What is it?” Corvo says, curt. “I’m packing, as ordered. My ship leaves at the end of the week.”

“I know,” Emily replies. His resentment is sour between them. She shifts, stops slouching; sits the chair like a throne. And then she settles her hand on her belly. She sees the shift in Corvo’s eyes even before she speaks, the way his eyes dart from her stomach to her eyes, to Wyman, the half steps back he takes as his jaw tightens.

She almost doesn’t even need to say it.

“I’m with child,” she says.

“Congratulations,” Jameson bids politely. Corvo’s reaction is the one the room cares about, that _she_ cares about.

“You still want me to go to Karnaca?” he asks.

“Yes.”

She doesn’t look away from him. Her hand is resting on layers of cloth, nothing of actual substance.

“Congratulations,” Corvo says, echoing Jameson. “By your leave, Empress. I have packing to finish.”

Emily waves her hand to dismiss him. He bows, and turns on his heel to go. Rather than look at his back, Emily watches the gulls circling outside her window.

* * *

 

Martha knows she’s going to die. Burning to death isn’t the way she’d choose, but here she is, sharing a death with heretics.

Maybe she is a heretic. She’s seen enough in the last few days that the Abbey would call her one for speaking of it. What’s Corvo going to do without her to take his place, she wonders, and Emily, too. There have been whispers, and those gruesome murders.

She doesn’t want to die. She’s afraid, and she doesn’t want to die.

Martha Cottings has these thoughts within the span of half-seconds, watching the witch’s apartments burn around her, watching the oil paint catch light and burn through pigments, and then her heartbeat stutter-skips as something strange happens to the fire itself. It seems to slow, a pounding ache settling behind her eyes. A bright line sears through her vision, and the world tears like so much paper, a hand reaching through it, and then the full torso of a woman dressed in red, with a splintered arm and an eye glowing like a lit coal.

The witchcraft of the past few days is nothing in comparison to this.

“Come with me,” the woman says, stepping out into the frozen room and offering her hand.

Martha takes it. She wants to live.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry (late) Christmas! We also now have a cover, as seen in chapter one.

The Month of Winds is true to its name; it’s been a deluge for the past week, with the wind whipping about the rain beating down on the roofs and turing the gutters into rivers, sweeping the detritus of the streets through them and into the Wrenhaven.

Inside the Tower, it’s warm and still by comparison, a fire burning in the hearth. Emily shifts on the bed, never good at staying still unless she was spying. Laying prone, she looks at the ceiling, the moulding of the ceiling hardly worthy of prolonged study, her fingers twitching against the cover of her bed. Hypatia stops what she's doing to scold her with a glance, and Emily settles, hands folded just under her bust. Hypatia’s fingers probe at her abdomen, and she’s at least grateful that they’re warm.

Hypatia frowns in the middle of her search.

Emily has a horrible and sudden vision of the infant being deformed. Rotting inside her, unfit for life from the start, some horrid amalgamation of diseased flesh and nightmares from the darkest portion of the Void, somewhere that light doesn’t reach.

Of deformities worse than a lip split to the nose or an extra finger tucked behind a lace cuff.  
  
In a flash of thought, she envisions lifting a crying baby from a cradle, and it turning to look at her, opening its eyes to reveal inky blackness.

Hypatia’s hands slide over her stomach, fingertips pressing in to feel, cutting her out of her woolgathering, and Emily presses back against the bed, turning her face away. It is so strange to be touched by someone who isn’t part of her atrophied circle of trusted acquaintances. Before, too, there was the violent intimacy of fighting. Now, she can only expect Wyman’s embrace, or Jameson’s errant hand on her shoulder or touching her wrist to draw her attention.

“Baby seems just fine,” Hypatia says. Emily looks back, and watches her draw a stethoscope out of her waistcoat, settling the buds in her ears.

The circle of metal is far colder than Hypatia’s hands, and Emily would flinch away from it if she had the choice, but she doesn’t. It’s never been in her to fight doctors, Sokolov taught her that much, and this is for her child.

It takes a few tries for Hypatia to find what she’s looking for, each raise and press of the stethoscope like an icy brand on her skin, but a smile breaks on the good doctor’s face after the third time, and she speaks as she unhooks it from her ears, “Would you like to hear?”

“Yes,” Emily says, and takes the stethoscope when it’s offered. Hypatia holds it steady, and it takes Emily a moment, but then—

A heartbeat. And the sound of so much rushing water. She opens her mouth to speak, but closes it instead. She can hear her own heartbeat (how many times has someone else tried to stop it?) and the other, softer one accompanying it.

Emily rests her hand on her stomach. She’ll need to stop making public appearances soon. It won’t be appropriate, and beyond that she sees no reason to order a new wardrobe to accommodate this.

Emily pulls the stethoscope from her ears, and offers it back to Hypatia.

“You’re taking the position?”

“I am,” she says. “The Academy was very emphatic in their courtship. I’m sad to leave the Institute, but my voice won’t be the only one advocating for better care of Karnaca’s citizens, now that Lord Attano is in power.”

Hypatia goes to return the stethoscope to her bag, tucking it into place alongside the other tools she has kept in there.

“And,” she says, after a moment, “a request from the Empress herself is hardly one that could be refused.”

“No,” Emily agrees, pulling her blouse back down and tucking it back into her trousers, composing herself and then standing. “It’s not.”

“Is my presence required at the party this evening?”

“No,” Emily says again. “Would you like to come?”

She sits at her mirror, adjusting the pins in her hair, struggling against the idea of redoing the sweep, before glancing over her shoulder at Hypatia.

“Not in the _least_ ,” the good doctor admits. “But I appreciate the invitation, Emily.”

“Save yourself,” Emily advises. “If you leave now, you might be able to avoid the flower delivery.”

“Flowers? In this cold?”

“From the city’s greenhouses. I was overruled by Esma Boyle and Wyman alike. I risked insulting the delegation from Morley if I didn’t have them, and it being my last public appearance for months besides, conservatism was _not_ an option.”

She’s parroting back the Lady Boyle’s words and tone both, but the pin catches every errant hair, and Emily, satisfied, stands.

Hypatia’s eyebrows rise, but she does not comment.

“I’ll see myself out,” she says, and Thomas drifts from his omnipresent position at the foyer to hold the door for her. Once it’s closed, he speaks.

“Is it going to be that bad?” he asks.

“Probably,” Emily admits.

 

* * *

 

“And during the Fugue, too.”

“Who do you suppose the father is?”

“More importantly, whose Fugue party was she at?”

“Not yours, surely, Dorothea, don’t flatter yourself…”

“Whoever it is, they and theirs will certainly see an increase in their fortunes and position at court. _That_  will be how to tell.”

“Didn’t the Boyle heir just get one of the last remaining Whaling contacts? _And_ Esma helped plan this, even if she isn’t sitting at the high table, her fingerprints are all over these decorations—”

She’d blame being able to overhear the conversations happening at the tables lower in the room on the enhanced sensed the Mark gives her, but going by Khulan’s strained expression, it’s the acoustics of the room to blame for the gossip filtering to her ears, and not heresy.

Emily can’t announce she’s pregnant. Not in so many words. But clothing could be chosen for her that didn’t hide the roundness of her frame. That, combined with withdrawing from the public events would sent the right sort of signal, and then she could be announced as having been delivered of a child once she’d made it through the messy process.

And that’s what this was. The high-waisted pants and the tailored jacket made her look outright fat. She was a flashing sign, courtesy of the machinations of Esma Boyle and Jameson both, on display for the cream of Dunwall society and the delegation from Morley. This, and no more, and she’ll deal with that.

Jameson has passed on far too many whispers about the King and Queen of Morley for her to avoid this.

The servers arrive with the next course, dozens of them coming and removing the last plate and setting down the next before each guest. Emily stares down at her steamed fish, and lifts her fork to take a bite, signaling that everyone else is free to do the same. Now, she doesn’t have to eat until the next course, and the greasy fish slides down her throat rather than allow itself to be swallowed smoothly.

She wonders if Thomas is getting hungry, or if he ate beforehand. If they still used the Royal Protector as the poison-taster, he’d at least get nibbles, but they don’t— and the Mark helps with that sort of thing anyway.

She’d agreed to have the Lord of the Third Chair and the Third Lady of the Second Chair sat to her left, the Lady Maeve taking precedence over the Lord Niall and thus closest to her. Emily thinks she’d first found herself being truly fond of Thomas when he’d frowned like he was fed a lemon when Wyman had explained the labyrinthine intricacies of the Morlean court to him. At least Niall and Wyman have sparse shared history, having shared a tutor briefly as children in Wynnedown.

The Lady’s ties are to King Briam and the Lord’s to Queen Eithne, which makes the conversational dance slightly more complicated. Wyman is at her right, eating nearly as slowly as Emily, just across from Lady Maeve and more equipped to deal with the two of them. Khulan is better equipped for street brawls and sermons, not being caught between insults to his Empress and the delicate bickering of nobles.

Void, it was no wonder Wyman had developed the loathing she had for court life, if this was the normal way of things in Morley. Listening to each one delicately insult the other’s sovereign all night while putting forward the cause of their own has her irritated into a delicate stomach.

Still, they’re not talking quite loud enough to overpower the gossip at the lower tables.

It’s a relief when the procession of courses end and the dancing starts. Wyman escorts her to the ballroom, Thomas following several steps behind, and they dance to open the evening. Wyman is light on her feet for now, even with the limp, and they still move well, no stepped on toes, no hesitation as they move fluidly around the dancefloor. Maybe she should feel more ungainly with the new weight, maybe she just hasn’t reached the tipping point, but this is the first time she’s felt light since she last took to the rooftops.

Wyman tightens her hold on Emily’s hand, and she realizes the music is coming to an end, the orchestra in the corner drawing to a close. Their steps slow, halt, and Wyman releases her to bow. Emily, by rote, turns to the crowd waiting, politely applauding the two of them, and gives her assent for the rest of the couples to swarm the floor, rushing past Thomas, while the musicians strike up a new tune.

Wyman shoots her a look, and Emily gives the tiniest nod of assent. She leaves her side to make for Lord Niall, while she sees Jameson, on the other side of the room, making his polite introduction to Lady Maeve.

If nothing else, her obvious but unspoken condition nets her enough sympathy to break protocol by excusing her from the rest of the dancing. She takes a seat at the edge of the ballroom, a corner clearly meeting Thomas’ approval.

The only con to her brilliant escape is that she’s invited the guests to come pay tribute in this mock-court.

Thomas’ foreign sternness keeps the flightiest of them away, but the society matrons break past him first, possibly just to get a good look at the new Royal Protector. The only rumor she’ll have Jameson put to death is the suggestions that Thomas is her child’s father, and that one just for laziness, because the math doesn’t work out.

It’s such a dull receiving line that, at first, the appearance of the trio among the procession of elderly ladies doesn’t jar her from complacency. The change in Thomas’ posure is what cues her in, his shift to favor his dominant foot, the too-obvious hook of his thumb in his belt.

“Your Imperial Majesty,” the man says, who is seventy years old if a day, possibly even older than Sokolov. But he’s dressed well, if out of fashion in the way of the old, not the impoverished.

It takes her a moment, but:

“Lord Bunting,” Emily says, after rifling through the mental file of the guest list. Old money, art dealer, left Dunwall after the plague but returned after Delilah’s defeat. Can she give Jameson a raise? His drilling with cards bearing the names and titles of nobility, was, it seems, worth the annoyance at the time.

The old man smiles, and leans harder on his cane while he uses the other hand to gesture to the two behind him.

“May I present Dolores Michaels and Shan Yun, both of Karnaca?” Bunting says, stepping to the side to indicate his untitled guests.

Emily inclines her head the precise number of degrees to indicate acknowledgement and nothing more.

“Of Dolores Michaels’ Deposit and Loan Bank,” Bunting clarifies, quickly, his hands folded close to his abdomen. “And Shan Yun, the _Boreal Songbird_ — surely you saw the posters during your time in Karnaca, majesty?”

Michaels apparently possesses the keen sense for propriety that Bunting does not, and sweeps forward, bowing.

“Empress Emily, please forgive the intrusion,” she says, “Or any rudeness on the part of Lord Bunting. Mr. Yun and I have simply wanted to meet you for quite a long time, and seized the opportunity without enough concern for how it might make him seem.”

Bunting’s jowls and cheeks pale, his hand flexing on the top of his cane.

“Indeed, your Imperial Majesty,” the aforementioned Shan Yun says, his accent similar enough to Khulan’s that it gives her the briefest amount of pause. “We have waited for this day for a very long time, and are honored to be in your presence.”

Emily considers, and in doing so, allows them to see her considering, the pause as she looks beyond them, to the rest of the party. If Wyman was here, if Khulan were closer— but both are dancing attendance on the Morley delegation, to varying successes, for Khulan is a poor dancer.

“I am pleased you’re both having such a pleasant evening,” she settles on, her hands stilled in her lap as Jessamine used to, drawing on her mother’s legacy for an image of implacable courtesy. “I can only hope it continues to be so.”

The look Michaels shoots Bunting is as gratifying in its intensity as it is that Michaels is clumsy enough to let her see it. She sketches a bow, aware when the two men with her are not, and Bunting catches his courtesy enough to start one of his own. Yun does neither, and even steps forward, which Thomas counters with one of his own, halting the other man.

“Empress Emily,” he says, “Might I offer a song, in apology for our rudeness?”

“You may not,” she replies. Eyes have begun to turn to them beyond those who were waiting for their own time with the empress, and she catches Jameson’s eye from where he’s chatting amicably with who but Esma Boyle across the room. He excuses himself and begins the process of coming to her, slipping through the crowd at a lazy enough pace to not draw attention from those who haven’t noticed the disturbance at the makeshift throne.

Again, Michaels catches on where her companions did not. Her hand closes on Yun’s arm, her fingers like a vice on his flesh-filled sleeve, and she leans forward to murmur something sharp into his ear, her gaze slipping to Emily’s face once or twice as she steps to Yun’s side.

“Please excuse us, Empress,” she says, louder. “We’ll be taking our leave.”

Emily inclines her head by degrees, and all three members of the party, Yun includes, make the appropriate bow, of which Michaels is the most fluid, before easing out of the way and through the hall to the exit.

Yun turns to look back more than once, and Jameson reaches her as he does, noticing it, jaw tightening. He dips his head to better hear her, one hand curled around the side of the chair.

  
“What was that? They weren't on the guest list.”

“I don’t know,” Emily says, quiet and curt, glad the crowd that cares about this gossip is focusing on the backs of the departing trio rather than her. “But I want to.”

“I’ll have it handled,” her spymaster promises, glancing at Thomas as he rises, the two of them sharing a brief understanding in a gaze beyond Emily before he melts back into the crowd to do his job, a component of which is hopefully having them followed home.

Emily sighs, and resettles herself in the chair, one leg crossed over the other. Soon, the baby will actually inconvenience her. Now, she just feels antsy, the nausea passed.

She makes it through the rest of the line, some of those waiting more disturbed by the incident more than others, but all of them gracious with minimal barbed compliments, their collective distrust turned towards commoners infiltrating such an important event than their empress’ condition.

She won’t pretend she’s not grateful for the reprieve.

The night winds down, some of the guests leaving, including Khulan, who presses a kiss to her hand, and Esma Boyle, irritated at as she is by the earlier disturbance, but gracious beyond that, as the servants make fewer and fewer passes with trays of drinks, those remaining still mostly of the Morley delegation, too many staying in the Tower, having no Dunwall estates, and being unable to leave until Lord Niall and Lady Maeve do.

The orchestra strikes up the final waltz of the evening, slow and trembling through the strings of the violins, and Emily is expecting the touch at her elbow when it comes, turning her head to see Lord Niall smiling.

“May I?” he says, and wordlessly, Emily presses her hand into his, allowing him to lead her to the floor. His hand settles on her hip, and he leads with a fluid grace, aware of his feet in a way Wyman isn’t quite anymore, still healing.

“I was hoping to have you alone, Empress,” he says, smiling at her, his gloved hand mercifully dry and free of sweat.

“This isn’t alone, Lord Niall,” she says, already dreading whatever courtly game he wants to play.

There’s a bit of Wyman’s cleverness in his expression. Wyman isn't related to either the current King or Queen, but she has the Morley look as much as Niall does. Perhaps that's why he was sent.

“Alone enough,” he amends. “As likely as we are to be able to speak outside of dearest Maeve’s hearing, I think.”

Emily’s brow raises.

“You were lucky to catch Lady Wyman, of all those from Morley who might have wanted your hand. Myself included,” he flirts, his accent more pronounced than Wyman’s and rendering his words lyrical. “All the goodwill from my countrymen and none of the Morlean politics. Well,” he amends, tone shifting to serious. “Less. The smart military families stay away from the marital spats between our king and queen.”

“I’ve come to appreciate the divide,” she says.

Niall winces, comical. “I hope it won’t sour your relationship with your consort or the warm feelings you surely possess for your Morlean citizens.”

“The citizens are not the nobility,” she says, and his expression is feline satisfied.

“Hardly,” he agrees. “But our peculiar system of government is our own, and I will defend it as I defend my own honor.”

“Is Queen Eithne seeking a reassurance from Dunwall?” she asks, sharp, even as Niall continues to lead them in smooth turns around the floor.

After a moment, Niall says, “No.”

Emily’s about to push, but Niall’s tight lips stop her.

“Morley doesn’t need any more disturbances. We’re still recovering from the famine, soil and spirits both, I’ll not play at lies easily disproved. That other parties overestimate my countrymen’s ability to weather what might come after another incident is a concern to my aunt Eithne.”

She catches a glimpse across the dance floor of Wyman in the arms of Lady Maeve, leading despite her limp.

Niall continues, “She’s heard the sort of whispers that make her glad that you have the Abbey so close at hand.”

Immediately, Emily’s focus shifts wholly to Niall, her lips tight. He dips his head in abashed acknowledgement.

“How lucky you and Lady Wyman are, to live in such harmony, and with an heir on the way,” he murmurs, the band slowing, the waltz coming to an end. “Our own monarchs are two halves, but not of a whole. As useful as competing ideas might be in promoting change, it can allow for a certain amount of discord.”

He releases her hand, and steps back to bow. Emily sinks through the layers of his revelation, the second irritating puzzle of the night.

“Majesty,” he says, straightening. Maeve appears at his elbow, Wyman not far behind. Charming, he offers his arm to his counterpart in the King’s representative, which she lays her fingertips on.

Wyman drifts to her side, easy. She’s favoring her side, shifting her weight, tired from the dancing but still sporting a smile.

“You’re leaving so soon!” she says, lightly. “You’ve made me miss Wynnedown with all your stories, Lady Maeve.”

“Will we have an imperial visit soon, then?” Maeve says, her head tilting charmingly, lashes casting shadows on her cheeks. “King Briam would certainly welcome one.”

“I’m afraid,” Emily says. “That I will be disinclined to leave Dunwall while the restoration is ongoing.”

Maeve inclines her head. “Certainly understandable, your Imperial Majesty. I can understand how insurmountable such a task may normally seem, but the Kaldwins certainly have experience with such things.”

The barb is pointed and multifaceted, but nothing that hasn’t been delivered more eloquently by a Dunwall noble already.

“Did you enjoy your time with your Gristol peers?” Wyman slides in.

“I did,” Niall starts, but Maeve glances to the side, to the exit.

“And that interesting man, the _singer_ , what was his name— Shan Yun? It’s so enlightened of you, Empress Emily, to allow such people to attend your diplomatic events. But it’s understandable, given your ties to Karnaca.”

“My time in Karnaca was enlightening,” she allows. Emily’s tired of this, disinclined to play when Niall’s hint has her itching to talk to Jameson, to figure out how much of it is baseless.

“Forgive us,” Niall says, not the once looking to Maeve. “I fear I grow tired from all the festivities in our honor. By your leave, Empress?”

Maeve looks like she has more fire in her, a comment or two left to make, and her displeasure is expressed in her nails curling tight into Niall’s arm.

“Of course,” Emily agrees, and there’s another exchange of bows before the two of them withdraw, the ballroom emptying as the nobles retreat to estates, to their rooms in the Tower. Emily and Wyman— and Thomas, her constant shadow— make their way back to the imperial apartments, where the closing of the main doors has Emily exhaling and dropping into the nearest chair to take off her boots and exhale.

“Where’s Jameson?” she says to Thomas, who shakes his head.

“I don’t know,” he says. “He left in the middle of your dance with Lord Niall.”

Emily stands and goes to her dresser, angrily pulling pins from her chair. A maid will be along shortly to draw a bath and help her and Wyman undress, but she’s impatient.

Wyman leans against a dresser, fingers prodding into the flesh of her thigh, through her trousers, and Emily catches sight of her grimace through the mirror, and turns.

“What was that, with Niall?” she asks, still massaging her own leg.

“Let me help,” Emily says, guilt uncomfortable. “You danced a great deal tonight. I wouldn’t have asked if I’d known it would—”

Wyman cuts her off with a grunt as Emily kneels, slowly, fingers reaching for the buckles of Wyman’s boots, leaning away from her. Emily stops.

“I can’t avoid it forever, Emily,” she says. “I agreed to several things when I married you. I knew what you’d expect from me. Stop fussing. If anyone sees, they’ll be much less afraid of you.”

Emily sighs, shakes her head, and undoes the buckles anyway. Wyman clicks her tongue in disapproval.

“See?” she says, over Emily’s head, presumably to Thomas. “If Dr. Hypatia tells her she’s overworking herself, I expect you to intervene and tell her about this.”

Looking at Thomas reveals the twist of expression on his face.

Emily stands, slow, her back protesting suddenly. She presses her hand to the small of it to relieve the ache. Where was the maid? She’ll draw the bath herself if she has to.

“Don’t tease him,” she says softly to Wyman as she eases her feet out of her boots and sighs with relief.

“But it’s fun,” Wyman says. She reaches out and presses her hand to Emily’s stomach. Emily is inclined to flinch away, but Wyman looks at her instead of her abdomen, and she’s caught.

“Did Alexandria say when you’d be able to feel it move?” Wyman asks.

Emily shakes her head.

“No,” she says, caught, faltering.

“Would you ask?” Wyman says, and Emily nods. Wyman withdraws her hands, and claps them together.

“Splendid! Now, tell me what Niall was bothering you about— I remember him being particularly clumsy when we last met. It’s interesting that he’s improved.”

Emily opens her mouth to start, but there’s a knock on the door, and Thomas turns to answer it, a woman’s voice calling out, “My lady?”

“In the bath,” Emily says, making for the bathroom, her hand reaching for Wyman’s, their fingers interlocking as Thomas pulls open the door to allow the maid in.

 

* * *

  
_B.,_

_All is as well as it was in my last letter. I hope you’re faring the same. I would tell you not to dig too deeply, but Karnaca’s a mining town. Leave him buried, like he buried us._

_On the matter of our Sparrow, she doesn’t suspect a thing. She’s taller, which probably helps. Bites less too, which I’m grateful for. J. and I expect our duties to be doubling within the year. I wish you had bothered to warn me about that._

_It’s comfortable in my high perch. I don’t feel guilt like you keep saying you also don’t, but you have to admire the irony of it. Who could have imagined me here, all those years ago?_

_T._


End file.
